Friday, September 23, 2016

(The late Doctor Alexandre Kalomiros was one of Greece's most noted lay theologians. His work has been widely published, and this present article first appeared in "Orthodoxos Typos," Nrs 44 and seq.)

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

"Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou adore"(Mt.4:10).

In all matters, the Holy Fathers of the Church sought always, insofar as it was possible, in combatting the diverse heresies, to make use of the very words of the Holy Scriptures themselves. This was true also of their strategy in refuting the iconoclasts of the 8th century.In their Introduction to the decisions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the editors of the Nicene and Post Nicene series correctly observe:

....The Greek language has in this respect a great advantage over the Hebrew, the Latin and the English; it has a word which is a general word and is properly used of the affectionate regard and veneration shown to any person or thing, whether to the divine Creator or to any of His creatures. This word is proskynesis; it has also another word which can properly be used to denote only the worship due to the most high God, this word is latria. When, then, the Council defined that the worship of "latria" was never to be given to any but God alone, it cut off all possibility for idolatry, mariolatry, iconolatry, or any "latry" except "theolatry." If, therefore, any of these other "latries" exist or ever have existed, they exist or have existed not in accordance with, but in defiance of, the decree of the Second Council of Nicea.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, even our English term "worship" does not possess the rigid implications which some have sought to ascribe to it. The primary definition of "worship" is "to honour or revere, or account as worthy.” The mayors of important cities are referred to as “your worship.” Furthermore, the term "worshipful" is commonly applied to other persons "distinguished in respect of character or rank, entitled to honour or respect on this account". To this day, it is a title ascribed to "justices of the peace, aldermen, recorders, the London city companies, and the sheriffs" and later, to magistrates as well (Oxford Dictionary of the English Language).On the other hand, the term "adoration" is not quite so flexible, especially as regards things Divine. By definition, to adore is "to make an act of the mind and the will in acknowledgement of the infinite perfection of God; to make an outward reverence expressing such an act" (ibid, p 26). Indeed, even in Roman Catholic secondary schools to this day, a point is made of the fact that "adoration" is to be rendered to God alone.This distinction, as the editors of the Nicene Series point out in their above mentioned Introduction, is made most clear and manifest "in the inspired translation" of the Hebrew found
in Matthew 4:10, "Thou shalt worship (proskyneseis) the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou adore (latreuseis)." "Worship" was due indeed to God above all, but not exclusively to Him, whereas "adoration" is to be given to "Him only."These, too, were the very terms which the Holy Fathers employed in their conciliar definition. And though it may be true that, to a certain extent, the words "worship" and "adoration" do not possess that particular distinctness which their Greek counterparts possess, nonetheless they do to a very great degree possess its essence. Indeed, if the term "worship" can be used to honour the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Vancouver or London, who could refuse to apply the same term in our reverence of the sacred icons?In conclusion, it would be appropriate to quote here the Seventh Ecumenical Council's letter to the Emperor and Empress. The letter points out that St Paul "says of Jacob (Hb.11:21), `He worshipped the top of his staff,' and like to this is that said by Gregory, surnamed the Theologian, ‘Revere Bethlehem and worship the manger.’ But who of those truly understanding the Divine Scripture would suppose that here adoration, latria, was intended? Such an opinion could only be entertained by a simpleton or one ignorant of Scriptural and Patristic knowledge. Would Jacob give divine worship to his staff? Or would Gregory the Theologian command us to worship the manger as though it were God!" Moreover, did Christ Himself not say that if you sit in a lower place at the banquet table and are then invited by the host to take a higher seat you will be worshipped?”

FIGURES OF THINGS CELESTIALPART ONE

On the first Sunday of Great Lent, our Church celebrates the feast of the Restoration of the Veneration and Worship of the Holy Icons, after the terrible persecution against the Orthodox which was started by the heretical iconoclasts throughout the Byzantine Empire. During this period, a great number of Christians were martyred: some for hiding icons in their homes, others for confessing that there was no Orthodoxy without icons, and that he who renounced icons has in reality renounced Christ Himself.1In our day and age, it would be considered by many to be narrow-mindedness, fanaticism, worship of empty forms, and folly to sacrifice one's life for confessing one's belief in such insignificant "details." It is true that Christians of today are willing to betray, and that without too much remorse, not only icons but also their Faith. We see some who applaud those who are bartering our Church's Tradition to the Pope and to other heretics.Nevertheless, the Church of Christ has not considered the matter of icons a "detail." Pastors and flocks have understood that there cannot be things of primary and things of secondary importance in matters of Faith, for our Faith resembles a knitted object which begins to unravel when even one stitch is undone. This is why so many fathers, mothers, children, monks, teachers and bishops have shed their blood willingly, knowing that it would serve to water and strengthen the tree of Orthodoxy. And so, for the celebration of the re-establishment of the veneration of icons after this victory, the Church set aside this chosen day, the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

CONTEMPORARY ICONOCLASTS

Is the question of icons, which many of our contemporaries consider as no more than a mere detail, really of such great importance that the Church had to attach to the icon the very idea of the true way of thought, of the right Faith?To understand the meaning of the icon in our Faith and in Orthodox life, we need not exhume the ancient Byzantine iconoclasts; for, in our time, we have our own. They can be divided into three categories.

1. The Protestants, or Evangelicals, as they sometimes refer to themselves. These reject icons and banish them from their assemblies. Protestants consist of a multitude of heresies which fight one with another. Nonetheless, they are united on this one point: the rejection of icons.

2. The Roman Catholics. In theory, they recognize and accept icons, though for them the icon is not a sacred object, but simply an ornament; it is not an icon, but a religious painting. There is nothing sacred or holy in it. It is a human concoction, which follows current fashion in its style, as do all other human creations.

3. Those Orthodox Christians whose faith is vacillating, and who are ready to follow the former or the latter. Some are even indifferent to icons. They are influenced by the Protestants who say that icons are material objects, gross, incompatible with the religion of Christ, which is completely spiritual. Yet others permit icons in their homes and in church, but these icons differ in nothing from those of the Papists, being deprived of all sacred character; they are secular works of art, and have no relation to Christ or His saints, whose names they may well carry. They are nothing but melodramatic or affected representations of Christ and His saints.

THE INDEPICTABLE GOD

Let us now see what the first of these iconoclasts, the Protestants, think of icons. Their arguments are the same as those of the Byzantine iconoclasts. The Protestants maintain that the custom of painting icons has no foundation in the Old or New Testaments. Neither Christ nor His apostles have ordered us to make icons. On the contrary, in the Old Testament, God categorically forbids it:

Thou shalt not make to thyself an idol, nor likeness of any thing, whatever things are in heaven above, and whatever things are in the earth beneath, and whatever are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor serve them, for I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God, recompensing the sins of the fathers upon the children of the third and fourth generation of them that hate me (Ex.20: 4-5).Lest ye transgress and make to yourselves a carved likeness, any kind of image, the likeness of male or female...Take heed to yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord our God, which He made with you, and ye make to yourselves a graven likeness of any of the things concerning which the Lord thy God commanded thee. For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, a jealous God (Dt.4:16, 23-24).

The Protestants say that in the primitive Church, there were no such things as icons. Icons were introduced into the Church as an evil imitation of pagan practice.And what do the Holy Fathers answer to the arguments of the iconoclasts? Let us see.It is true that God forbade the Israelites to make an image of God. But what image could be made of God? Had they seen God? In the same chapter of Deuteronomy, where He forbids the Hebrews to make an image of Him, God gives this reason:

And the Lord spake to you out of the midst of the fire a voice of words, which he heard, and ye saw no likeness, only a voice (Dt.4:12).

When I spoke to you, said God, in the fire of Mount Horeb, you heard only My voice. You saw no image nor figure of Me. Therefore, if you wish to make something in My image, it will certainly not be in My image; for you have seen no image of Me. It will only be an idol, something that resembles a man or a woman, or some animal that walks on the land or crawls at the bottom of the sea, or some other creature. That which has happened to the pagans who do not know God, will happen to you; some have deified men, others animals, others stars, or other creatures.And Deuteronomy repeats once again:

Take good heed to your souls, for ye saw no image in the day wherein the Lord spake to you in Horeb in the mountain, out of the midst of the fire (Dt.4:15).

Thus the Hebrews had good reason not to make any image of God. What image could they make of Him? They had heard only His voice, and a voice has no image.As we can see, God was not hostile to images. He forbade the Hebrews to represent Him only because He is Spirit, the only truly immaterial Being. An immaterial spirit cannot be painted unless it takes upon itself a figure and appears to men.When God revealed Himself and spoke to the Israelites, He did not adopt a form. It was thus impossible to make an image of Him. If the Hebrews had tried to make one, it would not have been that of God, but a false image, an idol.

"THOU SHALT MAKE TWO CHERUBIM."

However, the Fathers continue their reply to the iconoclasts of all times: It is false to say that the Scriptures forbid images. As a matter of fact, while God was forbidding the Hebrews to represent Him in images, He besought of Moses the following strange things:

And thou shalt make a mercy-seat, a lid of pure gold, the length of two cubits and a half, and the breadth of a cubit and a half. And thou shalt make two cherubim graven in gold, and thou shalt put them on both sides of the mercy-seat. They shall be made one cherub on this side, and another cherub on the other side of the mercy-seat; and thou shalt make the two cherubim on both sides. The cherubim shall stretch forth their wings above, overshadowing the mercy-seat with their wings; and their faces shall be toward each other, the faces of the cherubim shall be toward the mercy-seat. And thou shalt set the mercy-seat on the Ark above, and thou shalt put into the Ark the Testimonies which I shall give thee. And I will make myself known to thee from thence, and I will speak to thee above the mercy-seat between the two cherubim, which are upon the Ark of the Testimony, even in all things which I enjoin thee concerning the children of Israel (Ex.25:17-22).

In another book of the Old Testament, we read the following narration:

When Moses entered the Tabernacle of Testimony to speak to God, then he heard the voice of the Lord speaking to him from above the mercy-seat, which is upon the Ark of the Testimony between the two cherubim and he spake unto him (Nm.7:89).

Thus we see that, when Moses entered the Tabernacle of testimony, he heard the voice of the Lord speaking to him from between the two icons of the cherubim, placed over the Ark of the Testimony. Now, can you see how much the Protestants and all the other iconoclasts err when they pretend that the Holy Scriptures, or rather, God does not want images? And not only the images of the two cherubim, but the Tabernacle itself may be seen as an icon, an icon of Heaven, of the Holy of Holies, the Throne of God, whence God spoke to men, where stood the cherubim, celestial beings who enjoy such familiarity with God that they stand next to His Throne.And even if God had never enjoined men to make icons, what of it? St Theodore the Studite says: Nowhere do we see Christ ordering His apostles to write even a line, no more than He Himself wrote even to give us an example. But nevertheless, His apostles have depicted His icon in words in the New Testament. Why should we consider it a natural thing to describe Him in books, but unnatural to describe Him with colours in icons?

THE WITNESS OF THE CATACOMBS

As we have already seen, the Protestants claim also that in the first days of Christianity there were no icons. But the catacombs of Rome have confounded them. They are full of mural paintings of Christ, the Virgin, and the martyrs of those days, as well as icons engraved on metal, like the one representing the apostles Peter and Paul. We also find some on the sacred vessels of the first centuries, and we are still finding more. There were crucifixes worn by the martyrs, such as the one found at Tomi (Constanta) in Romania, in the region of the gold mines, where Christians condemned ad metala were sent by the emperors for hard labour.2But suppose the Protestants were correct in maintaining that there were no icons in the primitive Church, what of it? The primitive Church did not even have the Holy Scriptures [of the New Testament] compiled as such. Only little by little was the New Testament written. Furthermore, the books of the New Testament were manuscripts only found here and there. It is only much later that the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, selected from among a large number of similar writings and compiled those which were authentic, true and unadulterated into what She now calls the New Testament.3Must we then destroy the New Testament because it did not exist as such from the very beginning? But what was there in the very beginning? Were there any churches? The first liturgies were celebrated in upper rooms and in catacombs. Must we also continue this custom?It is precisely because the Church of the first centuries was poor, exposed to continual persecutions, and did not as yet have artists, nor the means to create many icons, that those found in the catacombs are worthy of our admiration, in that they were painted underground, without any sunlight, but only by candlelight and under the sword of the persecutor.4

PROFESSION OF THE INCARNATION

Perhaps many will tell us: "We admit that, in Christianity, it is permitted to make icons, and we even recognize their beauty, and admit that they are appropriate church ornaments; but don't tell us that the icon is indispensable for Christianity, nor insist that those fanatics who were martyred for the sake of icons during the iconoclast persecutions, knew what they were doing when they were defending the icons, and that icons were really worth the shedding of their blood."But why then were so many people martyred during those iconoclast persecutions? For the same reason that the first Christian era was filled with martyrs; they sacrificed themselves lest they renounce Christ.But others will say: "Were the iconoclasts not Christians? When did they force the Orthodox to renounce Christ?"It is true that the iconoclasts called themselves Christians, just as our contemporary iconoclasts, the Protestants and Roman Catholics, consider themselves "Christians." But it is not enough to call oneself a Christian to be one; the Byzantine iconoclasts, like our contemporary iconoclasts, are deniers of Christ, and here is why:We have seen that God, while forbidding the Hebrews to make His image, commanded Moses to make icons (images) of the two cherubim and to place them in the Holy of Holies, specifying in great detail how they should be made. Why, then, did God, Who ordered the representation of the two cherubim forbid His own image to be made? Simply because He had not as yet manifested Himself in a visible form to men.But when the "fulness of time" had come, and God had put on flesh and had made Himself man, we, having seen His form and having seen the face of God, had then not only the right to make this image, but the duty, the obligation; for not making an icon of God in the flesh He had put on, amounts to a refusal to proclaim that God was made man.The denial of the icon is tantamount to a denial of Christ, to a denial of the Divine Economy, to a denial of our salvation. Here is how the Church sings this truth:

Being indepictable in Thy Divine nature, O Master, Thou didst deign to be depicted in these last days, Thou becamest Incarnate... (Third Sticheron of the Great Vespers for the Sunday of Orthodoxy). And: While depicting Thy Divine likeness in icons, 0 Christ, we openly proclaim Thy nativity... (Kathisma of Matins, Sunday of Orthodoxy)."He who seeth Me, seeth Him that sent Me" said the Lord (Jn.12:45). And elsewhere He said to Philip, who had asked Him to show him the Father: "Have I been so long with you, and yet thou hast not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, show us the Father?" (Jn.14:9)

And this is exactly what the Church does throughout the centuries, in that while showing to her children the icon of Christ, she shows them the icon of the Heavenly Father. She teaches and confesses that the Heavenly and Unapproachable God had taken flesh, and was made man out of love for us men. And now we see what God we worship, for we see Him face to face.How true are the words of St John of Damascus: "What the Gospels reveal through words, the painter shows us through his work."Thus, for the Church, the Gospel and the icons are of equal importance and value. Every iconoclastic disposition is an antichristian folly; since, in the Person of Christ, God has manifested His face to the world, it is an insult on our part to reject it. All those who are vexed and hindered by the icons while in prayer are, in reality, vexed by the Incarnate God.It is as if they were saying that Christ had done badly in taking human form and nature. The Jews and Moslems are, at least, consistent in their refusal of icons, for they deny the Incarnation of God. But the Protestants and other iconoclasts are not so sensible, and are without any justification.We can attain the Father, the unmaterial, formless, incomprehensible God, only through the Son, just as the Lord Himself said; for the Son has come to us in the flesh, that is in specific form. How could we reject this form (icon) without running the real risk of never reaching the Father? "No man hath seen God at any time," says St John the Theologian, "the only Begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared Him" (Jn.1:18). And St John of Damascus writes: "God, Who has no body nor form could not, in the past, be represented. But now that He has come in the flesh and has dwelt among men, I can depict His visible form."Like the Gospel, the icon speaks of the Truth. "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life," said Christ. Without any doubt, Truth can now be depicted. Truth is not an abstract thing; it is not one or many concepts. It is something concrete, living; it is a Person, the Person of the Incarnate Christ.When we represent the Person of Christ in an icon, we describe neither His Divine nor His human nature, for neither can be depicted. In the icon, we portray the Person of Christ, i.e., the incarnate Hypostasis of One of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, in Whom the Divine and human nature is united without confusion or division in a manner surpassing comprehension.In the portrait of any given man, we do not represent human nature, which is undepictable and incomprehensible; even so, in the icon of Christ, we do not portray nor represent the Divine Nature, which is inaccessible and incomprehensible. Only the Person of Christ, who voluntarily made Himself man, is portrayed.

CONFESSION OF DEIFICATION

So much for the icons of Christ. The representation of the saints in icons is a natural consequence of the representation of Christ. The Incarnation of Christ is also the basic theological foundation for the icons of the Theotokos and the saints, for it is through the Incarnation of God that the possibility of deification was given to man.If the saints were represented upon icons as mere men, no one would ask Christians why they represent them. No one would be scandalized at the portrait of man. But the saints are not represented on icons as mere men, as in portraits, but as men worthy of veneration, as sanctified men, deified by Divine energy (Mt.5:9; 2 Pt.1:4).This is a great stumbling stone to the infidel and the iconoclast. "You are idolaters," say the Protestants, "you worship wooden idols and images of men."We do not worship images of men, 0 blind ones, but the grace, the power of God which dwells in those men, in their bodies, in their icons, just as it does in their souls. Idolatry is the worship of a false god; for God Himself is in no way material and, when you form a material image of the unmaterial God, you have formed an idol in your mind. It is not idolatry to worship a sacred object, such as an icon, the Gospel, or the Cross, since the veneration is not toward the object itself, nor to a false god, but to the True God, the God of Abraham, Isaak and Jacob, Who sanctifies the object. It is not idolatry to venerate a creature, when the veneration and the worship redound to the Creator Who sanctifies it. Christianity is not an abstract philosophy. It is the worship of a specific Person, the worship of Christ, of God Who took flesh and bones upon Himself to sanctify the matter of the universe. In Christ, all creation has been sanctified, and matter has become a channel by which God's Grace comes to men.5We venerate and worship the icon but we do not render it the adoration and service due to God alone.6 It is God alone Whom we adore and serve. It is because we adore God that we venerate and worship His icon, and the icons of those in whom He has taken up His dwelling.7Adoration is one thing, veneration and worship another. The same applies to the honour and veneration which we render the saints. We honour and venerate the saints because they are vessels of God's Grace. When we honour the saints and venerate their icons, we adore God Who sanctified them.8The body of a saint, in life and after death, is a dwelling place of the Holy Trinity:

I will dwell in them and walk in them, as God hath said (2 Cor.6:16). If a man love Me, he will keep My words, and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him and make Our abode with him (Jn.14:23). Know ye not, says the apostle Paul, that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you? (1 Cor.6:19).

The bodies of the saints are vessels of God's Grace both during their life and after their death, and each one of us should come and avail ourselves of the Grace given them. This is why we Orthodox Christians venerate the relics of the saints, their "tabernacles" as we call them. This is why the icons of the saints, just like their "tabernacles," i.e., their bodies, work miracles; for within these material objects there dwells the Grace of God.St John of Damascus says:

During their life, the saints are full of the Holy Spirit. After their death, the Grace of the Holy Spirit continues to dwell inseparable in their souls, in their bodies, in their sepulchres, in their images and their holy icons, and this not by essence, but by Grace and energy.

LADDER TO THE HEAVENS

This is why we, the Orthodox, venerate the icons. By the Grace of God, the icon participates in the holiness of its prototype. Through the icon, we participate in that holiness according to the measure of the purity of our hearts; we receive the Grace which flows forth from the material of the icon. We are mystically sanctified by the operation of the Holy Spirit.The icon is thus one of the paths which lead us to God; it is a ladder which allows us to climb from earth to Heaven. In the same manner, the temple, the church where we assemble for various services and the Divine Liturgy, is a "Heaven on earth," as the Fathers say. Christ is present there through His Body and Blood, and His icon. His all-holy Mother is also present through her icon. All the saints and the Heavenly powers are also present through their icons, placed upon the iconostas and on the walls. During the Liturgy, the faithful who are assembled in the church commune with Heaven, because the liturgical prayers and the icons which are around lift them up. Let us not consider this to be merely a psychological phenomenon, a purely intellectual elevation attained by the words of the prayers and the icons which remind us of Heaven. Not at all! The lifting up of the faithful is a mystery. It is possible that they feel nothing at the moment; nevertheless, mystically, interiorly, when they commune of the Immaculate Mysteries, they are lifted up, regardless of the thoughts and feelings which at the moment rule within them. It is the action of Divine Grace which raises them up and sanctifies them.In truth, how strange is God's will! He has chosen humble matter, which we despise, to make it into a vehicle of His Grace. The oil of Holy Unction, the water of Baptism, the myrrh of Holy Chrism, the bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist, the bodies of the saints and their icons; all these material things, nevertheless, raise us to Heaven, much more than those great and sublime ideas which we men conceive with our poor minds.

PART TWO
THE FALSIFICATION

Let everything we have said so far be considered as an answer to all the modern day iconoclasts, i.e., the Protestants, Evangelicals and Reformed, say against us.But as we have said at the beginning, there is also a second kind of iconoclast, those who accept icons, but who distort them and alter their true meaning, considering them as nothing more than religious and ornamental objects, decorations brimming with the spirit of the world and of the flesh. These iconoclasts are actually Papists, followers of the Pope. They are much worse than the former; for it is better to cast out the icons of Christ and of His saints from our homes and churches rather than to introduce paintings which distort and thereby ridicule sacred persons, debase our religion in the eyes of the people of this world, and dim the brightness of the spiritual flame which must be born in them through God's Grace.The Latin Church has commissioned great painters to decorate her churches, but were these painters true Christians? Surely not. These painters took from the streets beautiful youths, with traits more feminine than masculine, had them pose as models and, with a bit of imagination, produced as a result a "Christ" full of carnal beauty, with melodramatic features, with affected expressions and gestures alien to the Christian spirit. Further, we know from history that some of their most beautiful paintings of the Virgin were modeled by the renowned prostitutes of those times. Others were the mistresses of the painters themselves. This was also true of the representations of different saints.9With the tolerance and often even the approbation and admiration of the Papal Church, these painters presented to mankind the sanctified personages of our Faith in a manner far removed from reality. Their primary aim was to show their talents and nothing else. They cared very little for raising to Heaven the souls of the faithful who admired their work, for they sought only to fill their eyes and souls with vain, carnal beauty, alien to the spirit of the Gospel. This is why this type of iconoclast is far more dangerous than the first. It is, in fact, more honourable to deny icons, to deny Christ, than to accept icons which, instead of expounding Christ's religion, teach an altered and adulterated religion, a religion made unrecognizable by the distorted persons one depicts. It is preferable to have no icons than to have icons which enervate the souls of the faithful, pervert their spirits and grossly misrepresent Christianity.

AN EXPRESSION OF THE TRUTH

The Westerners say that it is normal for various schools of religious painting to exist, because every painter attempts to paint Christ to the best of his ability and as beautifully as he may conceive Him to be. But Christ and His saints were real people; we do not have the right to paint them as we imagine, even with a pious imagination.In Christianity, like the written or spoken word, the icon speaks the Truth. It is impossible to paint Christ just as anyone might picture Him, for it is no longer Him we paint but an imaginary character which is arbitrarily called Christ. By referring to such a portrait as "Jesus Christ," we tell an enormous lie and thereby deceive men. Christ must be represented as He is and not as we think He is.Orthodox iconography is an art of realism par excellence. Imagination has no place in it. The icon, like the Holy Scriptures is based on historical fact. It describes the historical facts of our Faith with colours and form, whereas Holy Scriptures do the same with the written word. Therefore, an Orthodox icon can express nothing but what the Holy Scriptures say. In an icon, Christ must appear as He appears in the Holy Scriptures and in the conscience of the Church. A saint must also appear on an icon as he appeared in history and in the collected Lives of the Saints. It is impious and inadmissible for one to make use of fantasy to describe facts from the life of our Lord by the written or oral word. It is equally impious and inadmissible to use one's fancy to paint the same events with a brush.The truth which the Church proclaims can be adulterated not only by the word but also through the icon; and it is not only by writing or speaking that we are in danger of becoming heretics, but also by painting.PURIFICATION OF THE SENSES

How, then, can an iconographer remain Orthodox? How will he avoid the easy fall of falsifying the Truth with his brush? How will he accomplish the difficult task of portraying the Truth in the countenances of Christ and of His saints whom he paints? The path the iconographer must follow in his work is not different from that of the preacher, or of the writer of religious books. It is no different than the road of every Christian who wishes to believe rightly.What must a Christian do to be Orthodox? First he must be humble and have a feeling of his own nothingness and sinfulness. Humility and contrition will purify his heart that he may see clearly. "Pride compels a man to contrive innovations, since it cannot suffer what is ancient," writes St Ephraim the Syrian. The Christian must fast and pray with compunction. He must humbly follow the teachings of the fathers of the Church, and try to imitate their lives, that he might become worthy of the light from on high. These same things apply also to the iconographer who wishes to paint Orthodox icons. He must be humble. He must look at how the pious iconographers of the Church have been painting icons throughout the centuries even to our own day, and he must paint like them, without innovating or abandoning "what is ancient." He must pray very much and fast so that God may open the eyes of his soul that he may see what is true and what is false, what is spiritual and what is carnal. He must have heroic strength not to submit to the tastes of those who commission him to paint, be they priests, the parish council or foolish persons who, unfortunately, do not know what an Orthodox icon is, and cannot discern what is aesthetic and what is not.

REALISM PAR EXCELLENCE

Perhaps someone will think: If Orthodox iconography is a realistic art par excellence, which admits no exercise of our imagination, then the best icon would be a photograph, or what, at any rate, most resembles a photograph, for a person can be represented only by this with perfect objectivity.There is no greater error than to believe that a photograph can represent a man. No photograph has ever represented him, and the millions of pictures taken to date have not been able to achieve this. A photograph brings out the appearance, the external characteristics of man, but it cannot represent the interior reality: man in his fulness. Photography pictures man as he appears, but not as he is in reality. A great and admirable painter is he who, while painting a portrait of a man, at the same time is able to express the underlying qualities of the man's soul, heart and spirit, as also is he who, while painting nature and created things, can by forms express the causes and the mystery of things that be. Such an art, true art, can come only from the Truth, and only the Church of Christ can give birth to it. This art is Orthodox iconography or, as secular people call it, "Byzantine painting." Only the icon can depict a being and, at the same time, express the truth of his countenance; only it has the strength to represent the holiness, the Divine light, the radiance of Divine love, the charity, the humility, the contrition and the purity that is hidden mysteriously in the facial expressions of the saints. Only it can show to those who have spiritual eyes the new creation inaugurated by the Incarnation of God: the deification of man.The icons show us poor men the Kingdom of God coming with power, according to the measure of man's capacity and receptivity, even as the Transfiguration of Our Lord on Tabor revealed His glory to the three disciples "as each one could endure." The spiritual things which this sacred art reveal to our eyes cannot be perceived by all, but only by those who are capable of understanding the depth of the spiritual beauty of Orthodox liturgical icons. Others see only their aesthetic beauty, if that.The icon does not represent the perishable body of a saint, but the eternal reality of his person. This is why we say that Orthodox iconography is par excellence realistic, for it does not limit itself to a faithful representation of but one of the aspects of a material and sentimental reality but, with the poor means at man's disposal, it renders all the reality of the human being, the reality of the deified man. Through the visible, the Church beholds the invisible; through what is temporal, She sees the eternal. In the liturgical icon, strange and incomprehensible encounters occur: eternity is revealed in time, Heaven comes down to earth and encompasses mortals. This is why the Fathers say that the building where the faithful assemble, the temple or the church, with its icons painted on the walls and on wood, with all that is said there, and all that is celebrated there is an icon, an image of Heaven, a realization of Heaven, though made with perishable means on this perishable earth.To paint the icon of a saint, one must have tasted of sanctity; one must have lived the experience of the Grace of God. One must have received the Divine light, as far as this is possible to the soul. The painter who does not possess all this must be very careful, for every brush stroke can lead him to heresy. There is only one path left to him: He must walk faithfully in the footsteps of the ancient iconographers, and paint strictly as they did. This is how he can keep himself from all error, and thus give his works the seal of eternity. And spiritually he will be profited, for by adhering to the types left by our fathers, he also will taste of eternity and participate in the experience of the holy iconographers of the past, that is, the life of the Church.

THE GOOD TRANSFORMATIONS10

Many Christians are offended by the ascetic aspect of Orthodox icons; they are even frightened by the austere expression of Christ and His saints in our iconography. They desire a very human Christ. Most of them want to see only a man in the icon of Christ. They fear to find themselves before God. But Christ is God-Man! Woe to those who wish to represent Him only as a man to the eyes of the world! All those who represent Christ as an ordinary man in saccharine icons, and those who introduce these cheap reproductions into their homes and churches in no way differ from the heretic who teaches that Christ is not God, but a simple man, even if in their inexcusable indifference, they do not understand their error and sin.As we said before, a man does not become a heretic by word of pen only, but also by the icons he accepts into his home or church. This is why Saint John of Damascus said these fearful words: "Show me the icons you venerate, and I will tell you what you believe." If St John came into our homes and saw our icons, who knows how many of us he would find Orthodox? On the other hand, if we examine those who alter the iconographic tradition, we shall find that they trample also other matters of the Faith and that, in general, they have a "natural" faith, as the Apostle Paul would have said, that is to say, sentimental, shallow, false, not at all spiritual.Let not the ascetic aspect of the icons of Christ and His saints frighten us; this austere and sorrowful aspect conceals the whole mystery of piety in Christ. We must not forget that the majority of saints, as we chant in church have "by the streams of their tears cultivated the barrenness of the desert; and by their sighings from the depths they bare fruit a hundredfold in labours." Let us not think that this sorrow in Christ, this life of tears and sighs, is wearisome and full of misfortune. On the contrary, affliction in Christ is the only way to Heavenly bliss, of which the saints taste while still in this world; it is the gladdening sorrow of which the Fathers speak, a mingling of joy and sadness, full of serenity, humility and love. St Isaak the Syrian writes, "No one knows the joy which comes from tears, save he who has given his soul over to this labour." It is thus through affliction in Christ that gladness and joy are born. He who can feel these things will feel the greatness, the incomparable beauty of Orthodox icons, though presently he may find them repulsive, pervaded as he is by the spirit of the world.Here is how Saint Symeon the New Theologian describes the changes which occur on the countenance of those who progress in sanctity:

"I know some among you," said he to his disciples, "who partake of the common table with a contrite and humble heart, yet do not even eat of the simple meals before them, but remain hidden in silence, whose souls are filled with compunction and tears, prayers and supplications, spiritual labours and prostrations, which cause them to be transformed with that good transformation, and who have acquired a most ascetical and beautiful countenance."

Do you see how this great Father of the Church considers ascetical beauty, which he calls the good transformation? Truly beautiful is the ascetical countenance of icons: carnal men, whose spirit is of the world, cannot perceive this beauty, and this is a great loss to their soul.

I AM FILLED WHEN I GAZE UPON YOU

He who has not learned to look at icons loses much! For simply to gaze upon them gives the Christian great profit, whereas to gaze upon the worldly and affected religious paintings of the West causes great harm. A little story borrowed from the Patericon will explain better what I am saying:

Three fathers had the custom of visiting the blessed Anthony each year. Two of them questioned the saint concerning thoughts and the salvation of one's soul. The third asked nothing and kept quiet. After a long time, Abba Anthony said to the third: ‘Behold, you have been coming here for a long time now; why do you never ask me anything?' and he answered him: ‘Father, I am filled when I gaze upon you.’11

Do you see the great spiritual benefit which even the sight of the saints can procure, especially that of austere ascetics of the desert, like Anthony the Great? The same benefit is also produced by looking upon the icons. Blessed are those who possess such icons in their homes and in their parish churches.Icons are not ornamental, but sacred objects. They are not paintings, mural decorations, but vehicles of Divine Grace, ladders which lead to Heaven, figures of things celestial. They represent the Kingdom of Heaven, Paradise, with Christ in His glory, surrounded by His saints, like celestial bodies which receive their light from another, being illumined by the might of His Divinity. Icons are images of the new creation, of the imperishable and eternal world. They are images of man's deification, accomplished by the session of the worshipful, resurrected body of the Saviour at the right of God in the Heavens.12 Beneath the humble material of the icons there is concealed the power of God, which has sanctified the saints, and through them, has worked miracles. It is this power which we adore when we kiss an icon with our lips; when we worship it, we are adoring the one God in Trinity.These sacred objects cannot be fashioned as we please, according to our carnal tastes; neither can we place them where we want, like paintings in a living-room or elsewhere, among the profane objects of the world.In every home there should be a corner reserved for holy objects: holy water, the Gospel, the wedding crowns,13 holy books, with an oil lamp always burning (Ex.27:20-21), where also there arises that incense which is both perceptible and spiritual: our prayer.

EPILOGUE OF THE TWO GREGORIES

"Brethren", says Saint Gregory the Theologian, "let us not do in an impure manner what is holy, or what is sublime in an uncomely manner, or in an unworthy manner what is worthy. To be brief, let us not do in an earthly manner what is Heavenly. In our religion, all is spiritual: actions, movements, desires, conversations, manner of walking, clothes, gestures; for the mind permeates all these things and makes one a man of God."14

And St Gregory Palamas writes: "With love shall you make the icon of Him Who became man for us. Through it you will raise your mind to the worshipful Body of the Saviour, Who sits at the right hand of God in the Heavens. Like Moses, who made the icons of the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies, you also depict the figures of the saints, and venerate them, not as gods (for this is forbidden), but because of the relationship, disposition and surpassing honour you have for them when your mind is carried up to them through the icons. This Holy of Holies was a type of things super-celestial, and this holy adornment bore the image of the whole world. Moses called these things holy, not glorifying things created, but through them be glorified God, the Creator of the world."

ENDNOTES:

1.This fight by the Church for the Faith lasted for about 100 years. The persecution began under Emperor Leo the Isaurian (717-741), who was the first to attack the veneration of icons. It ended with the Orthodox victory, crowned by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, held during the reign of Empress Theodora and her son Michael the Third (842-846), when St Methodios the Confessor was Patriarch of Constantinople. This victory is celebrated on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, which is a recapitulation of all the victories of the Church over all heresies. The synodicon which is read in church anathematizes the heresiarchs and glorifies the Orthodox Faith and Her defenders. In our days, this Synodicon is of particular importance to our Faith, which once more is being assaulted by the unloosed waves of the new heresies.

2.There were, in fact, some icons made during the earthly life of the Saviour and shortly afterward. We have, as an example, the image of Christ's face which He Himself placed on a mandelion of the ruler of Edessa. Apostle Luke made the first icon of the Theotokos, and the historian Eusebius (265-340) records, "I have seen a great many images (portraits) of the Saviour, of Peter and of Paul, which have been preserved up to our times" (Hist. Bk 7, ch 18, P.G.20, col 680). Eusebius also describes in detail the image of the Saviour which was made by the woman who was healed of the issue of blood (Mt.9:20-23; 5:24-34; Lk. 8:43-48). This figure was made in Caesarea Philippi, and was reproduced in relief on an ancient sarcophagus which is preserved in the Lateran Museum. Clement of Alexandria (d.126) describes the symbols and images of human forms which may be used on seals.

3.In the first centuries of Christianity, the Four Gospels, the Acts and the letters of Saint Paul were widely circulated and read. Other letters, smaller and less frequently read (e.g., 2 Peter, Jude) seem to have been less circulated, accepted by most churches but not by all. Works by post Apostolic Fathers were also read in churches for edification and instruction (e.g., THE SHEPHERD OF HERMAS). Very early there also appeared corrupted collections of the Scriptures (e.g., Tatian's DIATESSARON), or scriptures which were completely heretical (e.g., Valentinus' GOSPEL OF TRUTH). It was this challenge of heresies which necessitated the drawing up of canons which carefully distinguished those books which were normative for the Faith (see the Muratorian Canon, c. 170, listing those books accepted by the Church in Rome). As the Church was able to manifest consolidation following the reign of Emperor Constantine, when the persecutions ended, there emerged a position of unanimity regarding the canon of the New Testament. This necessitated men illumined by the Holy Spirit ("in Thy light shall we see light" Ps.35:10), perceiving clearly wherein lay Orthodoxy in matters of Faith, who could both meet the objections of those sought to exclude certain books, and apprehend the errors inherent in other, at times widespread, writings. Such men, both individually and gathered in councils, certified those books which were both apostolic in origin (having been written, by those immediately associated with the apostles if not by the apostles themselves) and consistent in doctrine with the teaching of the apostles. The first individual to cite all 27 books comprising the canon of the New Testament as we have it today was Saint Athanasios of Alexandria in his 39th Festal Epistle (367). The first council to list these same books, declaring in addition that only these were to be received as canonical, was the Third Council of Carthage (397) in its canon 32. Such decisions were confirmed by the 6th Ecumenical Council (691) in its second canon, and again by the 7th Ecumenical Council (783).As regards the apocryphal writings it should be noted also that many of them originally may well have been authentic writings from apostolic times which were greatly expanded upon and corrupted by the countless heretical sects. Indeed, if they did not contain certain essential kernels of truth, their acceptance by the Christian community would have been a complete and foregone impossibility. [Translators' Note].

4.Quite naturally, in the course of time and during the many persecutions, much evidence from the early Christian era has been obliterated. Do we not see the same occurring in the Soviet Union today. [T.N.]
5. [Translators' Note] "We do not worship images of men, 0 blind ones! but the Grace, the power of God which dwells in those men, in their bodies, in their icons, just as it does in their souls." And this, precisely, is why God chose to work wonders and is marvellous in His saints; and although it is certainly possible for Him to act directly, as indeed He does, yet He has chosen repeatedly to work His mighty acts through material means, and the Scriptures are replete with such examples. Hence, we have the rod of Moses which turned into a serpent (Ex.4:2-3), turned the Nile River into blood (Ex.7:20), brought the plague of lice upon all Egypt (Ex.8:16). And what of the brazen Serpent which preserved and saved all that looked upon it (Nm.21:8-9), or the Ark of the Testimony which Oza audaciously touched and died straitway (1 Chr.13:9-10), or the mantle of the Prophet Elias, with which the Prophet Elisha smote the Jordan River and divided it (4 Ki.2:8 and following). In 4 Kings 13:20-21, we read the following remarkable account: "And Elisha died and they buried him: And the bands of the Moabites came into the land at the beginning of the year. And it came to pass as they were burying a man, that, behold, they saw a band (of men) and they cast the man into the grave of Elisha. And as soon as he touched the bones of Elisha he revived and stood up on his feet."In Acts 19:11-12 we read: "And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, so that from his body there were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them." And in Acts 5:15 we see that, seeking healing and blessing, the people "brought forth the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least, the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them." As God's Grace can thus come to rest upon physical objects, as physical objects thus participate in God's Grace, even so have the saints come to know and to participate in God's sanctifying Grace in a very special way, their relics continuing to manifest this Grace after their repose, their icons also imbued with and participating in this sanctifying Grace.

6.The terminology of the Seventh Ecumenical Council is as follows: "The worship that is according to the honour due to them" (timetiken proskynesin) or "relative worship" (kata schesin proskynesis) is rendered unto the holy icons, whereas adoration and service (latria) is offered to God alone (see Translators' Introduction).

7."I no longer live, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal.2:20). "For ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said: I will dwell in them, and walk in them" (2 Cor.6:16).

8."Wondrous is God in His saints" (Ps.67: 35) . "I said: Ye are gods, and all of you the sons of the Most High “(Ps. 81:6).

9.As an example, at the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, there is a Renaissance painting of the "Madonna and Child" with the added note, "After Botticelli," for the face of the "Virgin" is identical to that of Botticelli's famous "Spring."

10.The Greek text may also be rendered "The Beautiful Transformation." This identification of "good" and "beautiful' is maintained throughout this section.

11. See Ps.16:15, "I shall be filled when Thy glory is made manifest unto me."

12.Our Saviour is the First Born of the new creation when He arose from the dead. He still had that body which He had before the crucifixion, for it still bore the prints of the nails. Yet, although it was the same body, it was "changed" (1 Cor.15:51-53), therefore also it was able to enter a room though "the doors were shut" (Jn.20:19). After the Resurrection, His body had taken on these new properties. It was a resurrected, a transfigured body, not subject to corruption. As "friends," as "sons," as "fellow heirs," as ones in whom Christ lives, the saints, who in spirit partake of the glory of Christ's Resurrection, likewise partake physically of that change and transfiguration which our Saviour's body manifested after the Resurrection. It is this "changed," this "transfigured" creation which the icons seek to portray.

13. In the Greek liturgical usage, the wedding crowns are kept at home. They are the symbol of the Mystery of marriage. As sacred objects, they have a place among icons.

Monday, September 7, 2015

MELETI 4 ON THE TRANSFIGURATION OF CHRIST:THE APPEARANCE OF MOSESAT THE TRANSFIGURATION

Some one has asked, "what about the appearance of Moses on Mt Tabor? Was this not an "out of body" appearance, since Moses was not caught up as were Enoch and Elijah?" Such a question could only arise from coarse materialism. Besides, why was it that, according to the Scripture, the Archangel contended for the body of Moses? Was Moses' body like that of John the Theologian resurrected and "caught up"? Did Moses appear on Mt Tabor actually with his body? St Ephraim the Syrian says of this:"Now he summoned Elijah, who had been caught up, and Moses, who was resurrected, and the three witnesses from among the preachers, they who were indeed pillars (Gal.2:9), for they supported the testimony of the kingdom... And as they came down from the mountain Jesus charged them saying, `tell the vision to no man'. Why? Because He knew that they would not be believed, but they would be considered madmen. Men would say, `How did you recognize Elijah? And lo, Moses is dead and buried and no man knows his grave!' So there would be blasphemy and scandal because of this ... and He said, `wait until,' meaning that they should wait until the tombs be rent asunder and the righteous come forth, the recent and the ancient, and enter into Jerusalem (Mt.27:52 -53), the city of the great king. And lo, then will they believe that He Who resurrected them also resurrected Moses..."St John Damascene says also:"Moses represents the community of the saints of old who have fallen asleep, and Elijah, the community of the living, for He Who is transfigured is the Lord of the living and the dead. Moses entered into the promised land, because Jesus, the Bestower of the inheritance, brought him in, and those things which he beheld in a type, today shine forth more clearly."Moreover, did the three apostles see Elijah and Moses carnally, or noetically, or not even that, but purely spiritually? They were in the light of God's glory, a part of that vision, and is the light of the glory of the Godhead seen by men physically or noetically, or purely spiritually? Let us see what St Gregory Palamas says of this:"Do you see how the Unseen One is seen by those who are pure of heart, not however, seen sensibly, nor noetically, nor conceptually, but by some ineffable power? ... But I shall tell you openly. The first martyr saw spiritually, even as those who have seen that pure light through revelation ... And if you become full of faith and the Holy Spirit, you will see spiritually things which are invisible to the intellect [ν ο υ ς ; nous]."And, as St John Damascene says of the vision on Mt Tabor: "Truly, the abyss of unapproachable light, today the uncircumscribable flood of divine radiance shines forth upon the apostles on Mt Tabor ... now things unseen by human eyes are seen ..."It is sufficient to declare that Moses and Elijah were seen by the apostles, but how and in what manner is known to God. It is enough to know that they did appear, and some of the fathers have explained why they appeared but few have ventured an explanation of how. We must remember here that we are dealing with an actual revelation of the glory of the Godhead, of Christ "coming in His glory." And so we are already not dealing with any sort of physical/material phenomenon (or would one assert that the light of God's glory is a physical, thus a created light?) So, we are outside time, space and all physical phenomena, and all on Tabor is taking place within the vision of the glory of the Godhead and, as Saint Anastasios of Antioch says:."..they (the apostles) went up to so lofty a place so as to be vouchsafed a vision which was called the Kingdom of Heaven by Him Who revealed Himself to them, being transfigured with the prophets."How, St Gregory Palamas asks, did the apostles even recognize the prophets? By revelation, he replies. And St Anastasios of Antioch concurs, adding, "And certainly the apostles were also prophets."How was Moses there? More surprising, how was Elijah there, being in a corrupt body which will some day die a martyr's death? If Elijah is still in his carnal, mortal, un-regenerated body (for it will die) how then is he with God in the spiritual world and appearing in that very immaterial light of the glory of the Godhead; how is his sinful carnal body participating in the glory of God? This question alone should make one wary of hasty conclusions concerning Moses. Yet, to a certain degree, we answered both these questions __ how was Moses there, and how was Elijah there __ already in Chapter 3 of The Soul, The Body and Death. About Elijah (and Enoch) we can say little, and only look in wonder. Nevertheless, the saints are participants in God. They are freed from the laws of time and place. They are participants already in God's glory. As participants in God, they are wherever God is. And if, in revealing Himself in that manner in which He does __ by the vision of His uncreated, immaterial glory __ what is so marvellous if He, at the same time, also in like manner reveals those who are always with Him, participating in Him and His glory? Whether Moses is immaterial soul or resurrected body, he is with God, and Elijah, by the will of God is also with God. God is not bound by laws.Will one insist that Moses had to have a material form (even a "subtle" one) in order to be seen by the apostles? Well, then, will one also insist that, for the purpose of this vision, the glory of God became material, had a created form? Light is not immaterial. It is physical, measurable, refractable. To insist that God could not reveal Moses on Tabor without his having at least a "subtle" form also, it would seem, implies the Latin doctrine of the material, created form of God's glory. If God was unable to reveal Moses on Tabor without his having an external form, how was He able to reveal the light of His glory without its having a material form? In other words, the insistence that Moses had some sort of a material form on Tabor (other than, perhaps, his own resurrected body, as St Ephraim suggests) forces us to re-fight the Palamite controversy all over again, because the essence of the question is quite clearly the same as Barlaam the Calabrian's challenge to St Gregory Palamas. Indeed, St Gregory says that Moses was immaterial on Tabor.Now, obviously, the Transfiguration was a super-divine manifestation, something beyond the capabilities of all such scholastic reasonings. Time and place do not exist here. The apostles could have been seeing Moses as after the general resurrection itself, for that matter, unless we are to limit God and His glory in time and space __ for this was that very same glory in which Christ will appear again at the last day (and look at the Apocalypse of St John the Theologian, for example).Thus, in examining the fathers, we find a consensus that Moses and Elijah were seen and recognized by the apostles by means of revelation. This fact already bars us from seeking definitions or scientific style explanations as to how Moses (or Elijah) were seen on Mt Tabor. But we have certainly seen enough to exclude any notions that Moses was on Mt Tabor in an "out of body appearance" or in the form of a "subtle body" (as the Gnostics might suggest). Let us conclude with these words of St Gregory Palamas:"But why did he separate the chief apostles from the rest and lead them alone to the mountain? Surely to show them something great and mystical. How, then, would the sight of sensible light be something great and mystical, since those who were chosen perceived such light even before being led off, as did the rest? What need would they have had of the power of the Spirit, and of the addition (to nature) by means of this power, or an alteration in their eyes, so as to be able to see light that is sensible and created? How should the glory and kingdom of the Father and the Spirit be sensible light? And how shall Christ in the future age come in this glory and Kingdom, when there will be no air, no light, nor any need of [physical] place or any such thing, but instead of all this there will be God, as the Apostle says. If God will take the place of all these things, He certainly will take the place of light. Wherefore it is proved that that light was the light of the Godhead. Hence the most theological of the Evangelists, John makes clear in his `Revelation' that the future and enduring city `has no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of the Lord did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof' (Rev.21:23). Has he not, then, clearly shown us here also Jesus Who is now divinely transfigured on Tabor, Who has His own Body as a lamp, and Who instead of light has the glory of the Godhead which became manifest to those who ascended the mountain with Him? Now concerning those that dwell in the city, John says that `They need no lamp, neither the light of the sun, for the Lord God shines upon them, and there shall be no night' (Rev.22:5). What, therefore, is that light, `with which there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning' (Js.1:17)? What is this immutable and unwaning light? Is it not the light of the Godhead. But how could Moses and Elijah __ and especially Moses, who was a soul and not something material __ appear and be glorified by means of sensible light? They appeared in glory and spoke of the departure which Jesus should accomplish in Jerusalem. But how did the apostles recognize them when they had never seen them before, unless it was by the power of revelation given by that light."Such are the revelations which the saints receive, but all those things which take place "outside the body" are demonic delusions, since the experience of God and the things of God take place in the depths of the body, for, "know ye not that your bodies are become temples of the Holy Spirit," and it is a true rule of all godly prayer that:"Wisdom moved by the Spirit is, according to theologians, the power of mental, pure, angelic prayer; a sign of this is that during prayer the mind is free from forms, with no image either of itself or of anything else appearing for an instant, since it is drawn away from the senses by the light acting within. For then the mind is removed from everything material and is like lights, being ineffably merged with God into one spirit."Where and how does one thus become so close to God? Saint Abba Dorotheos of Gaza replies:"To the degree that the saints enter into the things within, desiring to come near to God, in proportion to their progress in the things within, they do in fact come closer to God and to their neighbour."Here, we have touched upon a wondrous source of edification and spiritual instruction. Let the reader not be satisfied with only the few words of the Spirit-bearing fathers cited here. Rather, let everyone be moved to seek more, as a thirsty man in a desert craves water, let us seek spiritual sustenance and edification by reading whatever is to be found of the Orthodox fathers, and prepare ourselves to receive the light of grace like the wisemen of the East to whom God revealed the noetic vision of the light of a star, seen within themselves. For it was, as St John Chrysostom says, a noetic vision, and not a real star, and it was seen within themselves, and not by anyone else. They saw it well enough to follow it, but it was obviously not visible outside themselves. For with the faculties of the physical body, no one beheld it. Sensual vision is never enough to see with in any case. How many saw Christ and His mighty deeds as a "threat" and how many saw and beheld the Son of God, "that Messiah that is to come?" How many of the things of God and eternity are ever seen with the sensual vision? The sensual vision, it seems, only presents some evidence of what reality might actually consist in, and unless we see that evidence in another light, through different "eyes," then we never perceive it at all. The epic of the Magi is like the life of the Prophet Moses, and it would seem that it is also a testimony about the spiritual life of all believers. The Magi saw the light of God's kingdom within themselves __ with the eyes of the mind, those special "eyes" of the soul. And they saw it because their souls were open to this perception when the grace of God should bring it to them. They saw the evidence of the manifestation of the kingdom of God, which was beginning to grow within them, and with no little difficulty and struggle, they followed with unshakable faith, that evidence until it led them to the King Himself. Yet, when they saw the King, there was nothing in His appearance or surroundings (to those carnal eyes) which would commend belief in or reverence to Him. Still, they not only worshipped Him, but even adored Him. They could not have reverenced Him, they could not have recognized Him, except for that divine light, that evidence of the Kingdom which was manifested within them, and which the eyes of the soul perceived. When they set out and struggled to reach the King of that kingdom, they were led by the light of God's grace to Him, and they were able to recognize the King on account of that kingdom which was already manifested by the Spirit within them. The perception was noetic __ within them. The vision of the "star" was noetic __ within them. The recognition of the King was noetic, by means of spiritual eyes opened and enlightened by the grace of God, operating in a soul willing to co-operate with it.Now, the saints (indeed, all believers) have "seen His star shining..." and followed it, the light of this grace accepted into the soul which is willing to co-operate with it. They have struggled, set out on the desert path, to follow that light. Howbeit, the "world" does not see this light, this "star," and thinks those who are following it are bereft of good sense. And if the world seeks confirmation of that testimony of those who are following this "star," it is only so it can slay the offspring of this faith, so it can "send forth and slay all the children" of that faith.Let the world seek its spiritual goals "out there," outside the body, in the realm of the "Prince of this World." But let us, Orthodox Christians, hearken diligently to the fathers, with all sobriety and discretion, and in Orthodox fashion, struggle to keep our mind within ourselves, striving to cleanse and make ready the temple of our bodies, that our souls may find the Holy Spirit and the things of God, there in His kingdom in the depths of ourselves, where they are to be found.

7
A FURTHER NOTE:
VISUALIZATION AND IDOLATRY

Our descriptive apparatus is dominated by the character of our visual experience. It is for just this reason that linguistically based assumptions lead to errors in our understanding of the Divine and the eternal, the nature of heaven, the nature of hell and the relationship between body and soul in human beings. Linguistically based assumptions are derived from the presumption of visualizability. Language develops on the matrix of vision and is a developed system of imitation of and metaphor for things heard and seen. Idolatry, I surmise, can arise from the impulse to linguistically describe and define the unseen. This results in metaphor or allegory. When the metaphor for the unseen is, as it must be, visualized, some form of idolatry results. In Orthodox Christian theology we are preserved from this idolatry by the concept of the apophatic. In this regard, the words of Abba Isaak the Syrian are extraordinarily important when he says: "Speech is the language of this world, but silence is the language of the world to come," by which he also precludes the visualization of "things yonder." We are further protected against idolatry by Abba Isaak when he says of Apostle Paul: "Indeed, he wrote that he saw divine visions and said that he heard words, but was unable to describe what were those words or the figures of those divine visions. For when the mind in the spirit of revelation sees these things in their own place, it does not receive permission to utter them in a place that is not their own. Even if it should wish, it could not speak of them, because it did not see them with the bodily senses. Whatever the mind receives through the senses of the body, this it can express in the physical realm. However, whatever the mind perceptibly beholds, hears or apprehends within itself in the realm of the spirit, it has no power to express...For this very reason the blessed Paul by one word closed the door in the face of all theoria and the exclusion thereof he anchored in silence, where even if the mind were able to disclose that which belongs to the realm of the spirit, it would not receive permission to do so. For he said that all divine visions which the tongue has power to disclose in the physical realm are phantasies of the soul's thoughts, not the working of grace."This is interesting, because it shows us that the ability to visualize in material terms and to describe in language are interrelated, and that noetic things are subject to neither. For whatever visual and concrete concepts or ideas one has about the nature of heaven, hell, the Divinity, the partial and last judgments, and all things "yonder" are without fail delusion and phantasy. According to St Gregory Palamas, this is the also the mystery of Apostle's Paul's words that when he had his noetic experience, he did not know whether he was "in the body or out of the body." St Gregory does not allow the concept of "out of body experiences" but says of Paul: "He beheld, he says, `whether out of the body I know not, or within the body I know not'. That is to say, he did not know whether it was the intellect or the body that was seeing. For he sees, but not by sense perception, and yet [he sees] like sense perception sees perceptible things, clearly and even more clearly than sense perception. And he sees himself that, by the ineffable sweetness of that which he sees, he is apart from and caught away not only from every material and noetic thing, but even from himself." This is the point that neo-Gnostic writers do not grasp: "whether in the body or out of the body" does not at all indicate an "out of body experience," but rather precludes all visualizability or language based description of the experience and the vision, and thus guards against idolatry.
__________
1. Jude 9
2. Commentary on the Diatessarion, 14:5,8,9,10
3. On The Transfiguration, P.G. 96:572
4. The Triads, 1.3:30
5. ibid fn. 36.
6. Homily on the Transfiguration, P.G. 89:1369
7. First Homily on The Transfiguration, 50.
8. ibid, fn. 39.
9. First Homily on the Transfiguration, P.G. 89:1369.
10. 1Cor.6:19.
11. St Gregory of Sinai, Most Edifying Chapters, para.116.see also, para.131 and 132 (in the Philokalia)
12. Discourses and Sayings, para.6.
13. Homily on Matthew, 6:3.
14. It is more complex than that since warning crys, food communications and sexual attractions are all part of the use of language and of its origins. In Cratylus Plato calls words "an imitation of that which it imitates," and Aristotle refers to words as "imitations" (Rhet.3:1) but they had something of the concept that words conveyed essence and not simply names. There is another form of language which we must discuss later: the language of silence and of inner prayer — the language of paradise and of the world to come; the language of Rm.4:26 and 1Cor.14:15..
15. Epistle to Symeon of Caesaria
16. The Triads, 1.3:5; 21

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

ONORTHODOX CHRISTIANSYSTEMATIC PRAYERby Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

An extemporaneous talk givin at the St Gregory Palamas Conference, San Luis Obispo, California., 1999. Transcribed from audio tape by Anastasia Birou and and edited for publication by Makary Bieloivanov.

1

THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY

Before I speak about prayer, there are a few observations I would like to add to the previous paper. When we talk about the appearance of the "holy man" as an historical phenomenon, we are speaking also of certain major changes in society, and in the life of the Church. There are certain movements and changes in the structure of society, and in the way life in the Church is being shaped, which appear to necessitate a passage from the need for the ministry of kerygma to the ministry of prophecy. There is a time when we need prophets instead of preachers. Prophets do not teach in the same way that preachers do, even if the preachers are truly Orthodox. In North American society we have crises of corruption among those outside the Church who claim to be preaching the Gospel. The crux of the crises is with televangelists, if only because they reach so many people, but their style permeates most of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist preachers. Televangelists and "crusade" preachers are in the religion business and it is a lucrative business which has made many of them very rich. They occupy substantial niches on television and present the Gospel in such a way that they have encouraged the younger generation to reject Christ and Christianity altogether. Such preaching may be highly theatrical, often worthy of vaudeville, but at the same time it is highly formalistic and choreographed. Almost all of these populist preachers follow the same choreography and use the same studied and ritualized artificial vocal inflections, what someone once called a "Moody Institute dialect." They demand of people a moral life which requires great struggles of fasting and prayer, and yet either denounce, completely reject or at least ignore that kind of struggle. This kind of preaching is similar to the techniques used by Adolf Hitler to entrance and seduce the people of Germany. While it is conducive to the mass-hypnosis of a crowd, it has substantially undermined the credibility of the Christian faith in North America and elsewhere. Hitler once said that the mass rally is valuable, because it is there that people abandon reason in favour of the desired oversimplification. In this era when we see these preachers tap dancing around the podium, shrieking hysterically and staging fake healings, a change has also taken place in the general attitude toward prayer. In Evangelical Protestant and Fundamentalist ideology (it can hardly be called theology), the Christian faith is very much concerned with material well-being, with wealth, romanticized emotionalism and moral scapegoating. Because this ideology has had such a powerful impact in America — far more than in Canada — the concept of prayer has also been changed. We cannot avoid the reality that this has impacted upon many elements in the Orthodox Church also.The hesychasts or holy men and women of any particular historical era are people with a prophetic ministry, a prophetic gift, who have seen the generation of corruption within the Church, a stepping away from an effective prayer life, and an abandonment of the Orthodox Christian system of prayer which we have by revelation. To say that they see some unique corruption in society would be rather utopian. There is always a corruption in society at large, as there was in Israel, in the Christian Roman Empire, including the Byzantine period of that empire. The prophetic ministry in Israel did not concern the world at large, but was concerned with the life of that nation which constituted, at that time, the Church of the living God. The prophetic ministry manifested by the appearance of the "holy men" in the life of the Orthodox Church has not concerned the life of the world at large, but rather has concerned that which impacts directly on the lives of the faithful within the Church. St Symeon the New Theologian was not overly concerned about the civil society around him, but focused his prophetic ministry on the life of the Church, the monastic communities and hierarchs in particular. There is little use in criticizing civil society while the leaders in the Church are incapacitating the Church's ability to minister to the world. Ultimately, the witness of St Gregory Palamas was just as effective after the Turkish conquest as it had been before it. The leaders of civil society, the Paleologoi, Kantecuzene and the Serbian Tsar Stevan Dushan, in their overweening greed and lust for power, incapacitated what was left of the state and rendered it incapable of surviving the Turkish invasion, but the witness of St Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts strengthened the inner life of the Church, the inner life of prayer of the faithful, and remained a force after the secular state, that pitiful remnant of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire had ceased to exist. The rise of the holy man, usually from among the monastics, with a prophetic ministry, is a gift of grace to the Church. If it impacts at all on civil or secular society it is because this ministry has been heeded and re-enabled the Church to minister to the world in truth — not just the truth of words, but the truth of deeds and of the lives lived by the hierarchs and the people. This ministry is not manifested in histrionic sermons or angry moralistic preaching, but in the transformation of the lives of the faithful and the manifestation of such transformed, even transfigured, lives in the world. The core of this prophetic ministry, this prophetic teaching of these holy men and women, is prayer.

2

THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY AND PRAYER

There is a difference between having a system of prayer, prayer with a meaningful form, and a formalism in prayer just as there is a difference between formalism in worship and having a meaningful liturgical form of worship service — a form established by the Holy Spirit. The form of worship conveys the inner Gospel message of that worship and formal liturgical worship was established directly by God from the beginning of the human race. Televangelism represents formalism of preaching and worship, but is devoid of meaningful form and established only by the imagination and traditions of men. Formal liturgical worship is based in revelation and is filled with meaning and understanding. It has purpose, direction and destination, and is an antidote to spiritual chaos and confusion. The systematic prayer which has always been an instrument of the prophetic ministry within the Orthodox Church is likewise an antidote to chaos and confusion. Such prayer has not only a clear meaning, but it has a clearly defined purpose and destination.When a person is called upon to say a prayer impromptu in front of an audience, or told to have a prayer ready next week for some event, they are concerned with what the people of the audience are going to think of them while they are saying this prayer that they have made up. Such prayer is genuinely formalistic and often egoistic. One is not just trying to address God; one is also trying to impress the audience even if only subconsciously. This is what formalism actually consists in. A form or system of prayer can become formalistic to an individual, no matter that it is revealed by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the prophetic ministry actually tries to restore the perspective of such people.Civil society in Byzantium had developed such a deadly formalism that the whole structure of government was crippled by the most inane, useless and mindless rituals and formality which even the Emperor himself was obliged to go through, instead of tending to the business of the Empire. This naturally spilled over into every class of society especially the upper classes. The leaders of the Church had become corrupted by this degenerate spirit also, and this in turn crippled the preaching of the Gospel and darkened the path of salvation. At such a critical time in history the prophetic ministry was again manifested in the form of the hesychastic renewal: the prophetic ministry was directly tied to the meaning and purpose of prayer. It is recorded that on one occasion, the father of Saint Gregory Palamas was sitting in his place in the senate in Constantinople, at a time or crisis and emergency for the state. Senator Palamas was very deep in hesychastic prayer. One of the other senators turned to the Emperor and suggested that they "call him back" out of his state of prayer so they could ask his advice. The Emperor replied, "Leave him alone. He is doing much more good for us there where he is than we are here where we are." Ultimately, any solution to the problems of the State would depend on solutions to the fundamental problems of the fallen human nature. Those solutions certainly cannot be found in the almost brutish and hypocritical hypermoralism of televangelists and the twisted, deformed ideology of the Falwells and Dobsons of this world. They do not look for the actual causes of problems, rather, like Hitler, they oversimplify in order to gain support — primarily financial support, and instead of trying to help heal the problems, they seek to persecute them, to stir up hatred against them and advocate their own version of the "ultimate solution." The prophetic ministry seeks the solution to problems in the nature of the fallen human condition. The solution remains to be found in the struggle for transformation and the assimilation of the renewed nature in Jesus Christ. We attain this, only with great effort, by the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, and this requires a unique life of prayer and fasting. The preacher seeks to expound the elementary things of the Gospel — the sincere preacher, honourably, the hate monger and "for profit" preacher, dishonourably. The true prophet is not a soothsayer nor an entertaining predictor of the future. The prophet seeks to open the human nature to the light of grace, first to expose and then to heal. This is why I would identify the prophetic ministry with the holy man who preaches true prayer, a life of prayer and hesychastic prayer in particular. True prophets who have received some warning about the future which God commands them to proclaim, do so in order to arm people with spiritual struggle, prayer and repentance so that they will not be found wanting when those things do come to pass.That is all I wanted to say about the holy man: he is a transference to the prophetic ministry. If we look at the Old Testament prophets, the prophets were always on the periphery of society, they were not at the heart of society. No prophet can be an integral part of the society around him and fulfil his prophetic ministry. The prophetic ministry automatically places a person on the periphery of society, as it did in the case of St Symeon the New Theologian. First of all, he has to stand back and look at society from its outer boundaries, and he cannot be in the midst of it and still do that. Secondly, a prophet can never be accepted by society, because he is peeling away the scab over the sores of the society, and because he is offering a critique of society in the light of divine grace, with the grace of the Holy Spirit that has been imparted to him by God. We have a certain form of prophet in literature, the arts and even cartoonists. If you look carefully at the cartoons in the newspapers, you will see that there is a certain amount of social critique going on in them. There are different kinds of prophecy; there is a form of prophecy given by the careful and concerned social observer with no gifts other than his or her natural astuteness, and there are those prophets who are clearly inspired by the Holy Spirit. The latter has to somehow stand on the periphery of society and look in lovingly, with sorrow rather than with self-righteous condemnation. This is precisely what the holy man who arises at particular times in our history does. This is what the holy men at the end of the Byzantine Empire did. Foremost among them was Saint Gregory Palamas, the preacher of prayer, having received divine grace from the Holy Spirit. They had the gift of prophecy and they were making a critique of society in the light of that grace, not in order to condemn it, but in order to offer it healing, at least to those who had ears to hear the will of God. The primary vehicle for this healing was prayer — hesychastic prayer.Now, I want to invite your attention to the first question which I have written on the board and let you think about it, for a little while and think about what it means: "Morality is a heresy." I will explain why a little later.

3

PRAYER WITH FOCUS AND PURPOSE

First, I want to discuss prayer with you, in particular, why we have both a system of prayer as well as the spontaneous prayer that we practise within the context of our own private lives, and formal prayers that are unified with the worshipping community within the liturgical context. When prayer is spoken about in our day, we often hear about it in an emotional way, most often with a theosophical and New Age spin. One hears the most astonishing assertions: if your television set is broken, put your hand on it and pray, and you might be able to heal it so you will not miss any of your favourite soap operas. People will tune in to a certain preacher on radio and they will place their hands on the radios in the theosophical seance type of holding hands which is popular among sectarians, and all pray to lose weight together. This is how inane and degenerate the concept of prayer has become. If there is no economic or material benefit to it, why bother to pray? We pray for material things, we pray that we will not have to suffer and endure anything in this life, even though Christ directly promised us that His true followers would have to endure much. For many, prayer life has turned into a form of egotism, a self-satisfaction, a self-endorsement, a plea for instant gratification. Ironically, even while religion hawkers are selling their own snake-oil systems of prayer, they are preaching against the systematic prayer of the Orthodox Christian Church. Televangelist prayer systems are designed with the promise that they will attract material well-being, health and happiness — the acquisition of some worldly state without the process of purification — while the systematic prayer of the Orthodox Church has a definite and clear-cut spiritual goal and destination. The reason people do not understand Orthodox Christian prayer is that their own prayer life seldom has any destination or concept of precisely what it is they are trying to accomplish in prayer. The necessity to struggle for the purification of the conscience (heart) does not even occur to them. Most people, when they pray, are not trying to accomplish anything except to satisfy some emotional need or perceived material need. Often, people pray because it is a cultural exercise. In fact, even religion itself has become little more than a cultural affectation in our society. In America, many consider it a patriotic duty to be religious so they practise the cultural religion and pray because it is the proper thing to do. It is like singing "O Canada," "God Save the Queen," or "The Star-Spangled Banner." Even though religion and prayer may be a cultural affectation, they do not become an integral part of the soul of society. Religion and prayer fulfil a superficial emotional need in our lives, but we do not give it any depth, we do not give it any genuine meaning. Above all, we do not think of prayer in terms of the process of the purification of the conscience, the path toward illumination, and as an absolutely necessary part of the struggle for our salvation.When our holy fathers and mothers examined the matter of prayer, they never even considered the idea that it was an "obligation" to God or that it was somehow done "for God's sake." We do not have to pray in order to inform God, to let Him know something He does not know. We pray in order to draw ourselves closer to God, because we really cannot know someone that we do not talk to; we cannot know someone that we refuse to have discourse with. So, we pray in order to bring ourselves closer to God and learn more about what He reveals to us about Himself. Many of the written prayers in the Church are designed to lead us into this kind of prayer. They instruct us and give us a ladder that we can climb in an ascent toward this knowledge and understanding of God, bringing us closer to Him. They also offer us a proper perspective on ourselves.

4

THE LORD'S PRAYER AS REVELATION

The most formal of prayers is the "Lord's Prayer" itself. When we look at the Lord's Prayer, on the surface it appears very simple, but it is not simple at all. What is most astonishing about the Lord's Prayer is that in its profoundly simple beauty, such riches of theological knowledge are given.The Lord's Prayer is actually quite complex. If we begin to think about the unknowable, unseen, incomprehensible, uncircumscribable God as our Father, it is an astonishing assertion. He is not like us at all. We have no genetic relationship to Him. He is absolutely unlike us in any way and yet we have to conceive of Him as our Father. Moreover, this has to deeply shape our emotional view of ourselves and our relationship with the universe. Yet we humans manage to trivialize that. In many modern Protestant hymnals and prayer books, we see such perversions as "our Father/ Mother Who is in heaven," "our Parents who are in Hea- ven," and perhaps even, "to whom it may concern," whatever fantasy people fall into these days. We trivialize our concept of God as Father and make it an empty, meaningless, emotional statement. By trivializing the words and content of the Lord's Prayer, we trivialize both the meaning of God as our Father, the message of redemption and, indeed, Jesus Christ Himself. Do you see how easily we trivialize the words of Jesus Christ by rewriting the Lord's Prayer according to our own whims and fancies? Jesus Christ taught us to pray, "Our Father Who art in the Heavens, "o en tis ouranis." "In the Heavens," not "in Heaven," because God is everywhere present and fills all things. If we would take the time to contemplate the meaning of the words Jesus Christ has given us, perhaps it would be more difficult for us to trivialize them. The idea of God as our Father is astonishing. We must realize that God is our Father because he cared enough about us to adopt us as His children, to seek us and search us out to find those who were willing to become His children, in spite of our constant rebelliousness and self-will, and bring us into His own household and try to train us and bring us up in His way. It is an astonishing thing; "Our Father Who art in the Heavens." The word "heavens" refers to the material creation which we see when we look skyward — the moon, stars, planets, galaxies, and all that moves through the universe. The "heavens" has no mystical meaning, no metaphysical significance, it is just a bunch of material and energy that formed in the process of creation, but it does fill the universe and God does order and direct it. Our God is everywhere present and fills all things, and this is what Jesus Christ taught us when He instructed us to pray, "Our Father Who art in the Heavens." Hallowed be Thy name, Thy rule and reign come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." The word that is used in the original Lord's Prayer does not signify simply "kingdom" in our earthly sense, rather it indicates the "rule and reign" of God. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven." This time, Our Lord Jesus Christ narrows the scope down. He taught us to pray "Heaven," in the singular. He is no longer talking about the universe at large, but is using the word "heaven" in its abstract sense, the "kingdom of Heaven," that unique place of God. The "kingdom of heaven" is not a geographical location, or a political or physical entity such as an earthly kingdom. The kingdom of heaven, God's Kingdom, is present and manifested wherever the rule and reign of God has been accepted. Great mysteries are being revealed to us in this prayer, and yet some jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church literally trivialize the words and teaching of Jesus Christ by self-willed rewording of this prayer, done primarily for the sake of Ecumenism. The mystery of the fall of Satan from "heaven" is revealed in this prayer, for when we say, "on earth as it is in heaven," we acknowledge that the will of God has been freely accepted in that "place," if we may metaphorically call it a place. The rebellion of Satan against God was something permitted because God desires that each of his creatures takes a decision of their own free will, without compulsion, to be with Him or separate from Him. Love does not compel love, but desires that love be freely accepted and freely returned. Angels could not have been sentient, intelligent beings without freedom of will. Satan departed from heaven under the same circumstances that Adam and Eve departed from Paradise. A free will choice was made, and those angelic beings who chose to love God and remain united with Him, freely accepted His rule and reign, and were sealed in that choice forever. Thus, our Lord taught us to signify that unique "heaven" where the will of God is truly fulfilled, where the will of God rules and reigns in the minds and will of the angelic hosts. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven." The will of God is that all people should turn from their separation and live. The will of God is that all should freely accept His love and share in an everlasting life of blessedness. The will of God will be done on earth wherever the rule and reign of God has been freely accepted, which is why Jesus Christ told us that the kingdom of heaven is within us, even in our very hearts — that is, to those who, like the faithful angels, freely accept His rule and reign in their hearts. Thus, the way to bring about the rule and reign of God on earth, is to freely accept the rule and reign of God in our hearts. But the fulness of this message is also usually trivialized because so many people do not consider a correct translation of this prayer to be important, and they can think up a host of trivial excuses for not correcting their translations of it. It is also trivialized when one claims to "accept Jesus into his heart," but in fact, only so long as He doesn't bother us any, or make any noise down there or disturb us. We are not speaking here in terms of the novel concept of "accepting Christ as your own personal Saviour" which was invented around the end of the 1800's by the Revivalists Movement. This concept is understood in a legalistic way. You accept Christ as your own personal Saviour and then He is obligated to save you, because now you have a legal agreement with Him. Such people forget that the old covenant was not a legal agreement between God and Israel; it was a spousal relationship. All the Holy Prophets, without exception, try to remind Israel that they did not have a legal agreement with God but a spousal relationship with Him. A spousal relationship does not include non-involvement. Spouses do interject with each other and interject into each other's lives. Spouses have a relationship where they are quite free to be intimately involved in every aspect of each other's lives. The Church has a spousal relationship with God, and the will of God is done not where somebody just says, "Yes, I accept Jesus." The rule and reign is not simply a presence, it is a governance, it actually governs our lives and the structure of our being. Though we speak of the heart, of accepting Jesus into our hearts, we are talking about the conscience, which is the spiritual heart of man. The physical heart is an electro-mechanical pump. Our physical heart responds and reacts to emotional stimuli, but only because of hormones released by the brain. It is neither the seat nor source of our emotions, disposition or faith. The spiritual heart of man is his conscience and the conscience is the ultimate judge of man. So the purification of the "heart," "accepting Jesus Christ into our hearts," involves allowing God to rule and reign in our conscience. We will talk about this in the context of prayer in a moment.Our Father Who art in the Heavens, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily superessential bread, "epiousion arton," "khleb nash nasushni." It doesn't say simply "daily bread," it says "ton epiousion arton" — the meaning is deeper than simply "daily" — our superessential bread, the bread of life. Give us today the bread of life, that superessential bread that comes down from the Father. Give us today participation in our Lord Jesus Christ, Who said, "I am the bread of life." The manna was not given by Moses. The manna, that life-saving bread in the desert, was given by God, and Jesus Christ is the Bread of Life that came down from the Father. Give us today participation in the "epiousion arton," the superessential bread of life, our Lord Jesus Christ."And forgive us our debts;" the word "trespasses" does not occur in the original. Forgive us this day our debts, "ta ofelimata," as we forgive our debtors. There are two unforgivable sins mentioned in Scripture: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and refusal to forgive. If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven. If you do not forgive, your Father Who is in Heaven will not forgive you. You close yourself off from forgiveness, by refusing to forgive if only because by refusing to forgive you deny or trivialize the meaning of Christ's ministry and refuse Him a place in your heart. When you refuse to forgive you reject the rule and reign of God in your life and your heart, and when the rule and reign of God is no longer there, the will of God is no longer done. The will of God is that we should forgive as He forgives."Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into trials and tribulations, into temptation." Tempting or tempering is what a blacksmith does when he wants to strengthen a steel object he has made. If you forge an axe blade, while it is red hot, you dip it under cold water to temper it. You tempt or temper the blade to make it harder and more durable. When we pray not to be delivered into temptation, we are not suggesting that God would deliver us into temptation in the way we usually think about it — the temptation to fall into separation from Him — but we are nevertheless, willing to accept it when God determines that we need to be exercised or tempered in order that we be strengthened."Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." Jesus Christ never said "deliver us from evil" and we trivialize both His word and Him when we allow the mis-translation to be used. Evil has no ontological existence, evil is not a thing, is not a being so we cannot be delivered from it as if it was our captor. Evil is a condition of separation from the good. Deliver us from the evil-one, [Sl. ot lukavago: Gr. paniroui]. Jesus Christ did not come down to earth to redeem us from God. He did not come down to satisfy God's need for justice, for God is not subject to immutable laws of the universe over which He has no power. Christ ransomed us from the power of the evil-one, Satan and our struggle, like that of the Hebrews in the Sinai Desert, is to keep from falling back into bondage. The phrase, "deliver us from the evil-one" is a concise exposition of the meaning of redemption and a refutation of the Western doctrine of "the Atonement." Let us not trivialize Jesus Christ and His teaching, but rather let us accept His word and insist on praying the Lord's prayer as He taught it to us.The idea that Christ came to take on our "just punishment" vicariously and deliver us from God's juridical justice and satisfy His offended majesty, is simply pagan. That is the concept which motivated pagans to sacrifice babies to Moloch and Baal. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to redeem us. You can only be redeemed from one to whom you are in bondage. We are not in bondage to God, we are in bondage to Satan through sin because sin separates us from God. We fall into bondage, we are "sold under sin" (Rm.7:14) by our own acts and deeds, by our own choice of actions, which cause us to fall short of the glory which God intended for us (Rm.3:23) and become separated from God and thus from life itself. We are redeemed from the power of Satan and death, we are redeemed back to the household of God. This is revealed to us throughout the Old Testament in the laws of redemption. We see that revelation in the person who had the title of "first born," whether he was literally the "first born" of many children or an only child, or simply the one who held the position. In the concept of redemption and the Old Testament laws of redemption, the title "first born" is equivalent to "redeemer." The "first born" son of any household was obligated to redeem back to the father's house every seven years, any property, land, or real estate that had been alienated from the father's house. Every seven years he would redeem the alienated property for money if possible, but in any Jubilee year, he could redeem it without money, by demanding its return. Thus, the one who bore the position of "first born" bore the responsibility of redeemer. Our Lord Jesus Christ redeemed that which had been alienated from the Father's house, sold under sin, held in bondage to the fear of death by Satan. He redeemed us back to the Father's household. He did not redeem us from the Father, rather He "delivered us from the evil-one."The mystery of redemption is the mystery of the cosuffering love of God for mankind.

PRAYER AS PART OF THE HEALING PROCESS

We have discussed all this because a deeper understanding of the prayer which Jesus Christ taught us, the "Lord's Prayer," will help us to form our perspective about what prayer actually means. Prayer is not a social affectation nor an emotional fulfilment, nor something that props up our ego, as it often happens. When we pray, we want to feel the presence of God in our lives and sense more deeply the presence of the grace of the Holy Spirit. This is a basic purpose of prayer. This, however, can be expressed at a shallow, emotional level where emotions can be mistaken for a real, prayerful relationship with Christ. Prayer has a great deal more to say to us and to give to us. Prayer is a part of the healing process. The ministry of Christ on earth was a healing ministry, not a juridical expedition. Christ came to heal the fallen human nature and restore it to unity with God, thus unity with life. All of us participate in one and the same human nature for there are not many human natures, but one and it is a fallen nature. Jesus Christ came to redeem our nature and restore the perfect human nature in Himself. By becoming participants in Jesus Christ, we become participants in the perfect human nature, which is fully united with God; we become partakers of the redeemed humanity, freed from the bondage of the fallen human nature. Despite the vain and, in some cases, blasphemous attempts in the West to forge a rationalistic, juridical explanation based on the concepts of Roman and Germanic law, there would have been no other reason for God to become man. There would have been no need for God to become incarnate in the flesh. It would be useless had He not come to restore mankind to unity with Himself — or rather to facilitate and offer man the possibility of such unity. The whole life of Christ on earth is a revelation to us about the struggle for the reunion of man with God. It is made possible by Jesus Christ, but not made inevitable by Jesus Christ. It is up to us to accept and pursue this redemption, this healing and restoration.The life of prayer has a great deal more to do with the healing process than we often consider. That is why we have a system of prayer. We are being systematically healed and prayer is a major part of that process. In addition to the systematic prayer which St Gregory Palamas and other holy fathers defended against the Augustinian West, we have those prayers that we pour out from our hearts in the fulness of our grief and joy "in our own closet" (Mt.6:6). When hesychastic prayer was being taught from the very earliest times, Apostle Paul's command to "pray without ceasing" (1Thes.5:17) was taken quite seriously. Systematic hesychastic prayer is the method revealed in the Church by which we may attain to ceaseless prayer and at the same time be protected from delusion in our prayer lives. It is a part of the healing process in much the same way that a prescription given by a physician is part of the healing process for infections and physical illnesses. That is why it includes something called guarding of the mind, both to prevent our falling into delusion and to help prevent a "reinfection" by whatever passions we are being healed of.But prayer is very practical. It is not just an emotional or spiritual practice that leads us into some kind of mysticism or creates some form of "spirituality" for us. Mysticism and mystical do not equal the same thing. When we talk about mystical we are not talking about mysticism and when we talk about a spiritual life we are not talking about "spirituality," but I will explain why a little bit later.We will understand the concept of prayer as part of the healing process if we look at the process by which sin daily enters our lives, and examine how prayer responds to that process. Let us look at how the holy fathers defined the entrance of sin into our lives, and the process by which it takes possession of our minds and often becomes an addiction that consumes our being. We will see how we use prayer to repel or heal ourselves from that invasion of the spiritual virus that is sin. Sin does not mean breaking the law; sin means to fall short of the mark or goal which God has set for us. The mark and goal of having good health is intervened by microbes, viruses, bacteria, and that sort of thing. The same is true of spiritual health. Sin is a spiritual microbe that invades the body and dwells parasitically within the body. It lurks parasitically in the flesh. We are concerned, therefore, with spiritual antibiotics. We are concerned with spiritually struggling against these microbes, these viruses of sin, deceit and delusion that take root in our being and become parasitically imbedded in us. They consume us not only as individual human beings but as societies, cultures and nations. The holy fathers and mothers of the desert knew very well exactly what they were talking about when they defined the process by which sin takes possession of us. They did not simply say "The devil made me do it." The devil may delude us or take advantage of what we have become willing to do or in bondage to, but if we know the process by which this take place, we are able to use prayer as a powerful weapon against it.We are astonished at how clearly the fathers actually understood the physiological steps by which we become victims to these destructive viruses, these microbes of sin. How clearly the holy fathers understood that the soul and body are one unit and they operate together as a team; and how serious a Gnostic error it is to attempt to make a dichotomy between soul and body. Man does not possess a soul, but man is a living soul. Body and soul operate together and both are sanctified and both become deified and glorified together at one and the same time.So, let us take a look at systematic prayer in relation to the physiological path by which sin enters into our mind and takes control, even becoming an addiction in us. We will see that, although the holy fathers did not know the physiological structure and pathways of the brain, they nevertheless understood very well how it operated, the steps by which temptation enters our mind and the stages by which it becomes manifested, develops and becomes habitual and then addictive. They told us that when sin first enters into our mind we have to be constantly on guard, guarding our mind like a watch-dog at the door. We have to always examine the things that enter into our mind so that the negative things not enter in and take root. We must even guard ourselves so that virtuous things not become sin in us. This is a part of a systematic prayer life, part of the healing process. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" as the old English saying has it.Here is the order by which, according to the holy fathers and mothers, sin enters into and takes possession of us. When a suggestion enters into our mind, it is obviously not sin, because we have not acted upon it, we have not reacted in its favour. But, then, we begin to contemplate it. As we contemplate it, we find that we begin to savour and take pleasure in the suggestion. When we begin to take pleasure in the suggestion, even though we know just from our own human experience and reasoning — let alone the warnings of our conscience — that it can be destructive, we come to a point where we actually accept it in our mind. At what point does it become actual sin? At the point where we take pleasure in contemplating it or at the point where we accept it in our mind? At the point where we accept it, we come into a conscious agreement. At this point, we have decided not to struggle against it even though we know the consequences of not doing so. At this point, it becomes sin. Why does it become sin at that point? Because we have made a conscious decision to separate ourselves from God's will, we have rejected the rule and reign of God in our spiritual heart — our conscience — and this has separated us from God. This occurs not because it breaks a law, but because we have chosen to accept this over what we know to be God's will, and this separates us from God, causing us to "miss the mark" or "fall short of the goal" to which He has called us, for which He created us. Worse, we have rejected the terrible sacrifice which Christ made for us in order to liberate us from bondage to Satan, for we have made a conscious choice to enter back into that bondage. We have now set up a "golden calf" in our mind and returned again to the "hot pots of Egypt" (Ex.16:3). Still, even at this point our conscience calls out and rallies to our defence. We are faced with the choice of whether to reject the divine voice of our conscience or whether to heed it and struggle against our decision, our fall into sin. We are called upon at this point to metanoia, to repent — to rethink, to turn around and go in the opposite direction. The word repentance means to rethink, to have a different perspective on the matter. With regard to the guarding of our mind, when a suggestion enters our brain, we may not perceive it right away, but when it enters the part of our brain where we contemplate and think about it, then we are able to take action to drive it back out of our mind and to begin to resist it, or if it happens to be a virtuous thing then to accept it and try to set it into proper context, so that we are not led into sin through something that, on the surface, is virtuous. Ironically, we can lose our soul through our virtues also. So, we can think about it and we choose whether to accept or reject this thought or temptation. When we accept a negative impulse, it then becomes sin. That is why our Lord Jesus Christ said if one commits adultery in the mind, one is as guilty of it as if he committed it in the flesh. He did not mean that we are guilty for a passing thought, but you become guilty if you savour the thought of adultery, contemplating it in your mind and accept the idea. When you reconcile yourself to the idea, then you are guilty, because you have become reconciled to the act and accepted the desire and even carry out the deed in your imagination. You have resisted the voice of the conscience and failed to take steps to repulse the temptation. After that, as our mind takes this whole situation in, we act on it in one of two ways: either physically or mentally by contemplating and savouring it. Our conscience will still call us to turn back, to repent and will try to intervene in how we set the matter into context. When we set it in context, we adjust the context according to whether we heed our conscience or fight against it. If we have contextualized the matter contrary to our conscience, then it is on the way to becoming habitual and it is a small step from habitual to addiction. Our conscience continues to strive with us and at any stage we can turn back, but the further along the process we have gone, the more difficult the struggle becomes. When we set this whole matter into context, we either fall into a deep repentance about it and determine to purify our conscience through repentance and through prayer; seeking God's forgiveness — and actually we are seeking the forgiveness of our own conscience. The forgiveness of God is always there, if we just turn around and take hold of it. When we repent, we seek to reconcile our soul with our conscience. On the other hand, we might choose to push our conscience to the side. We think, "This is really very pleasurable. It does something for me; it might destroy somebody else and it might separate me from God, but it gives me pleasure, if only temporarily. I'm going to store it in this context in my memory so that I can draw it out again and savour it more."Now we have contextualized it and stored it in our memory in a certain way so that, even without committing the deed physically, we can draw it from our memory and savour it and take pleasure in it, and so renew the sin. Instead of repenting and purifying our conscience and our mind, we corrupt both. Now we no longer need an external stimulus to lead us into the sin; we have a stored up internal stimulus and we lead ourselves into temptation. We do not need the devil to tempt us all the time. In fact, I think the devil sometimes stands in awe and envy at the effective way we can tempt ourselves. This is how we make the sin habitual, by drawing it out of our memory and not trying to cleanse our mind and our memory. The next stage is addiction and then hopeless bondage. And then we wonder what bondage it was that Jesus Christ wanted to redeem us from! Partly, the bondage of our own mind, as well as the bondage of Satan and the power of the fear of death. "Inasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also took part in the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is Satan, and deliver those who through fear of death were all their lives held in bondage." (Hb.2:14-15)Man was all his lifetime held in bondage by him, who had the power of death. Not by God, but by the devil, and Satan has the power of death because we ourselves empower him. Satan has the power of spiritual death because we yield the power to him by accepting the delusions and deceit with which he entraps us. He has the power of physical death because physical death is the result of sin and we empower Satan by not struggling against sin. Mortality and death are not necessarily the same things. We have mortality and we do not necessarily have death. Man is not immortal by nature, but by the grace of God. Awareness of our mortality may help in the healing process of our nature so we can appreciate our mortality as something that reveals to us our need of God. Fear of death, however, bonds us to the spirit of this fallen world and the fallen nature. We die because we sin, we fall into sin because we fear death, and Satan is the great manipulator that makes us run on this treadmill to nowhere.We have examined the concepts which the holy fathers used to describe the entry and progression of temptations into our mind. What is amazing is how closely this system equates the actual physiological process by which this takes place. I want to take a look at the brain and show you why, from a purely physiological point of view, systematized prayer is a part of the healing process, and why people who have a prejudice against systematized prayer, because they think it is dry formalism, are dead wrong.When we talk in terms of human psychology and physiology, we discover the same process which the holy fathers described, only we use different terminology to describe it. Let us limit our discussion to negative impulses so that we will not become too technical. First of all, let us dispense with the idea that the physical heart is the seat, origin or generator of our emotions, temptations or emotional stimuli. All this takes place in the brain and the heart is only involved when increased bloodflow is mandated by the emotional reaction and called forth by the release of hormones.Our reactions are the result of some impetus which, technically, is called a stimulus. We will speak about a visual stimulus — there could also be an auditory stimulus. Suppose we are walking along a path and suddenly we see that we are the very edge of a cliff. We jump back suddenly and micro-seconds later we become aware of why we jumped back. This occurs so quickly that we are not conscious of the fact that fear preceded the awareness of fear and the reaction preceded the awareness of why we reacted. Here is what has happened, and this will be the circumstance in every case. It sounds very technical, but it all will make sense in a moment.A stimulus enters the brain. What happens when a stimulus enters, through the eye in this case, is that, in our brain, the stimulus goes into a region called the "thalamus."

[The Archbishop made the following drawing on the chalk board as he was speaking:]

That is the little round thing sitting on top of the almond in the little drawing I have made here. Actually, it looks like a walnut, but it is called an "amygdala" which means "almond." The little golf ball sitting up there — like the sort of thing that keeps so many people out of church on Sunday morning — is the thalamus. The stimulus enters that part of the brain and then takes two directions: it goes up toward the top of the brain, toward the visual cortex and it also sends its signal down into the almond — the amygdala. It hits the almond first, and then we react automatically without thinking. We do not think about what it is we are doing, we just react, and that is very valuable, because if you are walking along a path and you start to teeter on the edge of a cliff, if you stop to think the whole thing out and reason what might happen if you fall over the cliff and hit the bottom, you will be down there before you react. Instead, you step back immediately, without thinking about it. Afterwards you go through the whole process of thinking it out, "Wow! That was a close call. I would have been smashed to bits if I fell over the cliff."You start to reason about it instantly after the event, but you reacted emotionally before you thought out the matter. Then you go through the whole reasoning process, beginning from the visual cortex, and the whole picture forms. The reasoning or thinking process moves through the neo-cortex, and the signal, which began as an undefined stimulus, moves down to this lower part of the brain, down to the amygdala by a different route than the original signal from the thalamus. Now we are back down to the almond. Here, the two streams of the original stimulus meet in an area of the brain called the hippocampus — or hippocampi since there are two of them. Here, our brain sets the whole incident into context or contextualizes it, and prepares it to be sent into our memory. This is called memory potentiation, but we do not want to enter into a complex discussion of this. Since we have placed it in bold letters, however, you understand that it has a correlation in the system taught by the holy fathers, and we will place these two sets of vocabulary side by side in a moment so that you can see the true meaning and power of the patristic system of prayer defended by St Gregory Palamas. Forgetting about the cliff, let us look at a like sequence of events with a stimulus that might lead us into a sinful action. In that case, the conscience would have come into the action as soon as the stimulus moved from the thalamus to the cortex. As soon as we began to think about the meaning of the stimulus, our conscience would have entered into the deliberations in our brain.Now, at the point where we contextualize the matter, the conscience enters into the process in a very powerful way. If we struggle to purify our relationship with our conscience, to develop our conscience according to the faith and the principles of true morality, the conscience helps us to guard the mind from the very beginning of the appearance of this stimulus, which we might call a "temptation." It will help us to struggle against it at every stage, and now it helps us to set the whole thing into context. It brings us either to repentance or to going deeper into the abyss. Now the matter is set in context, we have two kinds of memory potentiation — long term and short term. If we have resisted our conscience and set this matter in the context of something that gives us pleasure (even if we only accepted it in our minds and did not fulfil it physically), and we really want to hang on to and savour the contemplation of the deed, it is going to go into our long-term memory in much this set context. It is going into our long-term memory in such a way that we can draw it out and savour it in future at the merest internal or external suggestion. So what happens now? We have a real potential for habitualization and addiction even if we do not fulfil the deed physically. We can become addicted to the contemplation of it. If you will compare this admittedly sketchy order of the steps by which a stimulus becomes action, context and memory, with the stages of temptation given in the system of the holy fathers, you will see that they are the same. The holy fathers gave us something concrete and practical, not something merely theoretical or ethereal. They had an astonishing insight into the manner in which the mind works and the steps by which we fall into active sin. Having such understanding, they also, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, provided us with systematic prayer to help prevent this fall or heal us after we had fallen. It is possible for humans to train themselves to take some control over the way they contextualize things for memory, and even to respond to many of their emotions in a reasoned way because human beings have a bi-directional neurosystem which allows the cortex to communicate with the limbic area of the brain. There are a number of approaches to psychotherapy in which this is demonstrated, and prayer is a part of our Orthodox Christian contribution to the psychotherapy process.Let us look at a more concrete example of the type of emotional response that might ultimately be contextualized and enter into active memory in a most destructive way. Our instant, emotional reaction to a stimulus can be useful, even life saving, as we have seen. The way we contextualize the matter can be quite destructive in some cases.Anger arises from fear; there is no other source of anger except fear, even when anger is inculcated into us through propaganda. Fear is the mother of anger, and anger is the mother of hatred, and hatred is the mother of malice. Fear may be just an emotion that takes place without initial thought — as when we see a snake on the path just in front of us. Fear can elicit a fight or flight response from us and, in the case of a fight response, fear produces anger, which in turn helps us to fight more effectively. When we contextualize our fear, however, we can contextalize it as hate or submission or in a number of other ways. That is quite useful in case of a war. If you are afraid of the enemy and you have to fight against him it is much more effective if you hate him, because that way you can fight with more intensity and without reservations. That is why the propaganda machine of any nation in the war tries to build up a fear of the enemy and then turn that fear into hatred. That is why they demonize the enemy, so that we will hate him and have less qualms about shooting him. It is also useful if the head of the government or the head of state wants to control you, because they can manipulate you far easier through fear than through any other emotion. Hitler spent a long time building up fear of the Jews so he could turn it into a hatred so that the nation would support him, no matter what he did. Hitler became the one who was going to "save us from this great enemy who was destroying our society and our culture," namely the Jews. Any time a demagogue wants to manipulate us or control us, he first has to make us afraid of someone in society, some group. It does not matter which group, but anybody who is a scapegoat. And then you change that fear into a hatred. The demagogue then presents himself as the one who has the solution, who can lead us against this enemy who might otherwise destroy our society and our culture and all that we hold dear. History has shown us how such a demagogue can take control of people and lead them into hatred and terrible deeds. It does not matter whether it is Hitler or a televangelist; the method and the end result might be the same.Satan is the master demagogue. He can lead us to fear someone, and then to hate them, and then into the bondage of malice. In such a state, we can become most destructive. Our conscience will try to intervene in this process at many stages and turn it back, even after it has entered into our memory to hate such and such a person or group of people. Our conscience will call upon us to repent of our hatred or malice and be healed of it. Alas, we can be a demagogue to ourselves, and in such a case, healing is even more difficult because we have to pray for help in overcoming ourselves. Our systematized prayer, the patristic hesychastic prayer defended by Saint Gregory Palamas in particular, serves to deliver and heal us at every stage of the process. Why is this prayer so potent in this healing process? Because it is focused, it has a known "destination," and it is aimed at a specific, practical purpose. We know the process and the steps by which temptation and sin enter and are manifested in our minds, and Orthodox Christian prayer is designed by experience and grace to precisely respond to this process.Orthodox Christian prayer is a "prescription" given by the Holy Spirit, designed to help in healing us of the spiritual viruses and microbes that want to parasitically inhabit our flesh and bring it into bondage and cause that spiritual illness which leads to spiritual death.Our brain, created by God to house our mind, is an integral part of our being, the seat of our reasoning faculties, the locus of our emotions and the dwelling place of our conscience, our spiritual heart. It is the place where we must begin the healing process. Hesychastic prayer is a spiritual medication. It is a process by which we gain control of the stimuli that enter our mind; it helps us to assess them and limit them and ultimately, such prayer helps greatly in the healing of our mind, the purification of the conscience and the strengthening of the will. It involves both the body and the mind, and so helps to collect us and unify our spirit. Prayer is psychotherapy — the treatment of the soul. Such systematized prayer is an extremely important part of Christian life, because Christian life is a struggle to find healing for the whole being, the whole person.

SYSTEMATIC PRAYERAND THEOSIS

Prayer also helps to bring us into accord with the will of God so that we no longer fall short of the "mark" or "goal," which is to be united with God and share in His immortality, in everlasting life and eternal joy. Everyone who has sinned has fallen short of the glory of God. We fall short of that glory of God which He desires that we participate in through theosis — the glory of God, not the "glorious ideal that God has for us," as some sectarian versions of the Bible say, but literally the glory of God (2Pet.1:4; 2Cor.3:18). We attain this state of participation in the glory of God by ascending through purification to illumination and then to glorification. Prayer is the primary instrument for this ascent because prayer is an act of seeking to draw near to God just as it is a tool for overcoming our sinful separation from God.Everybody in the Church is called "saint" by Apostle Paul because the Hebrew and Greek equivalents of the word indicate "dedicated to," "set apart," "sanctified to the use of." Yet we have those people whom we uniquely call "saints" and place on icons in a transfigured form.To understand this, and to understand the essence of Christian struggle, let us first set aside the un-Orthodox idea of "canonizing" saints. We do not canonize saints in the Orthodox Church. This idea of "canonization" is not an Orthodox Christian concept, but a term borrowed from the Latins. The expression in the Orthodox Church is glorification.The goal and destination of our prayer life and struggle is this ascent through purification of the conscience to illumination in the grace of the Holy Spirit, to glorification so that we no longer "fall short of the glory of God." How do we know that a person has attained to glorification, except that it be revealed to us by the Holy Spirit? And why is that revealed to us by the Holy Spirit, except that it shows that it is possible for man to attain? Why do we venerate those glorified saints in the Church, except that they have proved to us that though we have fallen short or missed the mark of the glory of God, we can return to that glory and ascend to that "prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" being "changed into the same image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord" (Phil.3:14; 2 Cor.3:18), and can participate in the glory of God; that we can become truly dwelling places and temples of the Holy Spirit; and that the Holy Spirit can abide in us and work though us, as He does in the saints. In such a way, people can see the glory of God and desire it. Only by this witness can mankind comprehend that our Lord Jesus Christ became man in order to unify man with God in Himself, and understand that our redemption consists in making it possible for us to truly participate in, and attain to, the glory of God once more — through the process of theosis.

PRAYER AND THE HEALING OF OUR NATURE;THE WHOLENESS OF MAN; ORDER IN PLACE OF CHAOS

The most concrete life of prayer, and systematic prayer in particular, is hesychastic prayer — the prayer defended by Saint Gregory Palamas and the prophetic ministry. It is a healing process by which our fallen human nature can become collected and focused, delivered from chaos and redirected toward the goal for which God created us. By means of such focused prayer, we can once more assimilate to our hearts the principles of life revealed to us by our Creator and Redeemer. With the help of divine grace, such prayer can help us conquer those things that separate us from God and from one another. By means of such an active and focused prayer life we can, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, become healed of those spiritual microbes, viruses and build-ups of spiritual cholesterol in our system. Consequently, when one denigrates or denies that systematic or hesychastic prayer which is fundamental to Orthodoxy, one denigrates the Gospel itself. Only the spiritually blind or ignorant could consider as formalistic ritualism that system of prayer which leads us toward such a definite goal, a definite destination, toward our high calling in Jesus Christ, toward restoration to participation in the glory of God. This is precisely what systematic prayer is doing for us. It is not a magical process; it is a free-will act of setting our desire toward purity, true morality and unity with God. The action of such a free struggle in man, and the process of such ordered prayer, helps to collect and bring the whole person together, dispelling the chaos and confusion from our lives. It solidifies our "person" and draws it into true communion with Christ. God is not a demagogue or a dictator; He does not force us into anything. The idea of predestination is a Gnostic heresy. There is no predestination for man just as there is no determinism in the created universe. We are free moral beings and, as such, obliged to make our own free-will decisions concerning our relationship with God and our expectations for everlasting life. Nowhere in creation do we find predestination or determinism. The Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty and the Hamiltonian Principle, which is the vector operator of the universe itself, testify to this. God created the universe as well as us. The universe is not something that came to be accidentally, and the structure of the universe is not accidental and we, as part of that created universe, are intimately connected to it. Thus, there is no predestination or determinism anywhere in the universe and least of all in the matter of mankind's salvation. So, we have to make free choices. God does not hold us like puppets on a string. We have the capacity to love and to reject love, so we can have a spousal relationship or opt for sheer ego. In this, we can understand the relationship between humanity and God. Both the Old and the New Testament covenants between God and man are spousal relationships, not legal agreements. That is why the Church is called the Bride of Christ. That is why God would refer to the old Israel, when it fell away into idolatry and Ecumenism with other nations as an adulteress or a harlot, because it was a violation of a spousal relationship — of the sacred covenant.

THE POWER OF COMMON OR UNIFIED
SYSTEMATIC PRAYER

The life of prayer, hesychastic prayer in particular, is the healing process which the Holy Spirit has revealed to man. By means of it, we cooperate with God's grace and gradually attain the healing of our fallen nature. We begin the process first by guarding the mind with prayer and vigilance, and then by entering into ourselves and looking after the soul itself as a garden, something like the garden of Eden. We enter into the garden of our soul to tend it, to pull out the weeds and tares which pollute it and choke off the fruitful crops of love and virtue. By means of this loving and prayerful cultivation, we make the soul a fit dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. When we seek to acquire the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we seek the help of that same Spirit to prepare ourselves for its indwelling. By continually tending the temple of our bodies and the garden of our souls, we attain purity of conscience so that we are able to bear the illumination of the Holy Spirit. We have to remember the promise, "blessed are those who love the beauty of God's house," and consider our soul and body together to be, as the Apostle says, His temple. If God's house is going to be our heart, our soul, our person, we have to constantly be tending that temple, and our life of prayer is precisely about such a cleansing and beautifying of this "temple" of God.Systematic prayer is dealing with this whole aspect of our life. We can pour out our prayers in moments of grief and lamentation, like the prophet Jeremiah, or in times of personal joy from the depths of own hearts. Systematic prayer is not only a personal, hesychastic experience, however. More powerful still is that unified prayer of the worshipping community when we all come together in the Divine Liturgy to pour out our common prayer. Such common prayer is like an army marching in unison. When soldiers are marching together, in step, such unified marching has great force. If the soldiers come to a bridge, they have to break step so that they are no longer marching in unison and rhythm, otherwise the strength of the unified step will cause the bridge to collapse. Our common, unified, systematic prayer has such power because it unites our hearts, draws us into a love and oneness with our neighbours and focuses us as a family, a worshipping community, on our ultimate destination, our common hope. It is true that God knows what we need before we ask and that God is always present to us. Our struggle is to become present to God. The Apostle never said, "Find some way to make God become reconciled to you," but, "Be ye reconciled to God." God is always reconciled to us, He does not change His attitude toward us, but we need to be reconciled to Him. Our common prayer which brings us together in a common act of love and worship, opens to us the experience of love of neighbour and unity with them in the grace of the Holy Spirit. You cannot obey the word of Scripture to have love among yourselves if you are alone. If it is only you alone, there is no one to have love among. You can only have such love in a community, and never more than when we worship as a community. God calls us together as family, as community. The whole structure of the universe is based on the principle of a hierarchical family and community. Even galaxies do not exist in isolation, but they exist in clusters of galaxies. So, everything in the universe is set to rhythms and harmonies and structures that indicate community, that indicate family. Consequently, we pray together in the Divine Liturgy in a way that informs and illumines the heart as part of a worshipping community, and a family of believers.The Divine Liturgy is revelation and prophecy given to us in the context of community. Just as in the Old Testament, the structure of the Temple was a revelation and prophecy, so every aspect of our common, systematic, communal prayer is a revelation to us. After all, the Holy of Holies was a type of Paradise. And it was in both Paradise and in the Holy of Holies that God the Word came personally to be present with man. It is the New Testament temple, where the altar is equally a type of Paradise, that God constantly calls us back to Paradise.The curtain of the Temple was torn in two at the crucifixion of Christ, because the Cross was the key that unlocked the gates of Paradise. The curtain was a type of that gate of Paradise which was no longer closed against us, but was reopened now, through Christ. That is why, when we begin the Divine Liturgy, we open the royal gates, because the gates of Paradise are opened to us. How are they opened and by what means are we called to enter in? As soon as the royal gates are opened, the priest elevates the Gospel and makes the sign of the Cross with it saying, "Blessed is the Kingdom of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." The Cross is the key that unlocked the gates of Paradise and the Gospel is the voice that calls us to enter into that kingdom that is now revealed before us.The Gospel is only useful, however, if people understand it, and decide to actually live it and not just pay lip service to it. It enters into our hearts and transforms us, but it actually changes us only when we make a conscious effort to assimilate it and be changed by it. The way we bring the Gospel into our hearts to transform us and to change us is through prayer. However, it must be prayer that is informed by the Gospel, prayer that is filled with the living spirit of the Gospel and not the letter only. This is a systematic prayer, not just the emotional prayer that we sometimes pour out in times of need, though these do indeed, bring us into a relationship with God.The systematic prayer which the Holy Spirit has revealed to us in the Church, and which was so diligently defended by Saint Gregory Palamas, makes the Gospel deeply alive within us. This is so because we do it intentionally, we do it consciously, we do it knowing why we are doing it; we do it knowing what destination we are aiming for, what goal we are aspiring to, what healing and restoration we are seeking. It is a prayer planned, planted, and tended, because we know where we want to go and we lay down the road map before us. Sin enters into us and develops in us systematically, as we have seen, and so we turn it back and drive it out systematically. And that is how we actually get to our destination. Even when we practise the systematic prayer of the Church alone, we are still practising the common prayer of the community, though there is no substitute for the Liturgical prayer of the "synaxis" — the coming together of the community. "One Christian is no Christian," the desert fathers often said. You cannot have love for one another if you are egoistic and alone. You can only have love for one another in community. It is because of both this profound sense of community and this awareness of a personal place in the community that we give a child of forty days Holy Communion by name immediately after baptism. They receive Communion by name as do all members of the community because, having entered into a spousal relationship with God in the Church, they have a name in the community, a name before God. When children receive Communion by name, they learn from their youngest infancy and begin to understand that they have a name before God, and therefore a personal relationship with Him, and a value in the community. They grow up realizing that they are a living, vital part of the worshipping community, they are a royal priesthood. They participate in the system of communal worship and prayer even when they are crying or appear inattentive in Church. They receive Communion by name, because they have a name before the throne of God, a name that is written in the Lamb's Book of Life. They are able to understand the connection with the community and with God through the community. Our life of prayer, our life of systematic prayer establishes that community of believers and brings us together as one through Liturgy and gives us a common face before God, and a real sense that God is our common Father.This brings us back full circle to the Lord's prayer, and we understand why God is our Father. Because we are a community, a family, God reveals Himself as our Father, so that we can understand ourselves as family. "Our Father Who art in the Heavens;" our Father, because we are a community, a family, brought together by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord Jesus Christ established us as a family by accepting us as His brethren. Jesus Christ is not ashamed to call us His brothers and sisters and, therefore, we are not afraid to call God our Father. We are a community and a family, otherwise God is not our Father. A family is not made up of isolated individuals. If we are isolated individuals we have no common mother and no common father. God will not be our Father by different spouses, for we are not stepchildren, stepbrothers, stepsisters. We have a common mother, even the Church, and the spouse of the Church is our common Father. God has revealed Himself to us through that family and community, and His covenant through the mystery of marriage. The mystery of redemption is revealed through the mystery of marriage. The covenant with God is a spousal relationship, not a legal agreement, and the mystery of redemption is the mystery of cosuffering love, the cosuffering of the Father with His children. The cosuffering love of God with His creation is what makes our restoration and redemption possible. It offers a bond of the most perfect and powerful love, a love that is willing to lay down its life even for those who despise it. The systematic prayer of Orthodox Christianity, a prayer life that is meaningful and understood, prayer that has a reason, prayer that has a destination, prayer that has a purpose; this is a healing process that has been given to us by God so that we might come into accord with His love and assimilate it to ourselves by defeating those sinful barriers to it which develop within us. This is the very meaning of systematic prayer, and of hesychastic prayer in particular.This is the whole root of the "hesychastic controversy." The whole controversy between Orthodox Christianity and Western Augustinianism concerned our relationship with God, our ability to know God through His uncreated energy, our ability to have a personal relationship with God, not through types and symbols, but directly through Jesus Christ. It was about our ability to be restored to the glory of God, our ability through prayer, through systematic prayer, to find that healing and restoration which Jesus Christ has made possible for us — the healing of the fallen human nature. That is why we know that the monks and nuns who went away into the desert were not simply seeking isolation away from the rest of humanity, forgetting about the plight of the world and mankind. We all have a common human nature. When one person, through prayer, struggles to purify their human nature and bring it into accord with the life of Jesus Christ, they become filled with light. When they become more light and less darkness in themselves, they drive the darkness out of their own life, they invite the light into their own life. When they accomplish this, then because there is less darkness in them, there is less darkness in the whole human nature and there is more light in the human nature. Their victory is a victory for all of humanity — especially those who believe. So, the monastics in the farthest part of the desert, Saint Sarah sitting on top of her house, Saint Pelagia in her little kellia, Saint Anthony the Great, Abba Sisoes or Abba Justin Popovich at Chelia, all these holy fathers and mothers were struggling for the healing and redemption of the whole human nature. In physics this is called the principle of non-locality. Everything that occurs in one field of the universe effects all the universe, every other field of the universe. Just so, every saint who has achieved glorification has an impact on all the rest of the fallen human nature. All the rest of the fallen human nature is more filled with light, and less filled with darkness, because one person has attained glorification. This is why we venerate the saints and this is why it is such a catastrophe that some people thought that there was something wrong with venerating them. They never understood the principles at work and they never understood the true meaning of redemption.I want to close by going back to this first statement which is written on the board. Is morality a heresy? Morality is a heresy when it becomes a substitute for our life in Christ. Morality becomes a substitute for our life in Christ when we reduce religion to a moral code, when we reduce the faith to a system of correct behaviour instead of a struggle to purify the conscience and acquire the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We cannot acquire the Holy Spirit by means of correct behaviour, which is just a matter of human works and legalistic works at that. Such an approach fills us with so much judgment and condemnation and arrogance and self-righteousness that the Holy Spirit remains alien to us. We begin to think ourselves to be moral and everyone who is not like us somehow immoral. We set ourselves as the criterion of morality, but there can be no true morality without the inner transformation of our person. Perfect holiness consists only in perfect love, not in correct behaviour. Righteousness does not consist in correct behaviour, but in genuine cosuffering love and pure faith. No deed has any moral value unless it proceeds from the heart motivated by love. Otherwise it is simply ethical or correct behaviour according to one or another system of law — a human work which anyone in any culture, with or without faith in God can attain to. The Old Testament law could help to preserve society but it could not save anyone, no matter how diligently they fulfilled it to the letter. Moreover, since it could not transform the heart, it could not even preserve the nation from falling constantly away from God. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the only One who fulfilled perfect righteousness was motivated solely by love, cosuffering love. And that is why our Lord Jesus Christ became our righteousness on the Cross, and imputed that righteousness to us through faith. Only righteousness is the fulfilment of the law and righteousness consists only in perfect love. The self-righteousness, the arrogance that we have which makes us judge and condemn others, by which we put our foot on the heads of the weak and push them deeper into darkness by our arrogance — this is the apex of unrighteousness and it is a great sin. That is ultimately what our struggle of prayer is all about, trying to acquire perfect, cosuffering love in ourselves, becoming truly conformed to the image of Christ, so that we may actually share in His glory, the glory of the Living God, receiving by grace through faith, "the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." being "changed into the same image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord" (Phil.3:14; 2 Cor.3:18).